🛠️ How I Worked
Sole designer across the full lifecycle — business requirements, wireframes, hi-fi specs, and QA documentation. Led cross-functional reviews with engineers, BAs, and compliance teams across 8 sub-modules over 1.5 years.
🚀 What Shipped
A unified interaction system deployed to 1,800 schools — one consistent pattern that scaled from 8 sub-modules to 12+ without redesign.
OASIS is the student information system for New York City's K-12 public schools — the largest school district in the United States. The Confidential Services module handles foster care placements, temporary housing, orders of protection, missing children reports, and meal eligibility.
Three user roles depend on this data daily, each with different responsibilities and data scope:
Quick access to individual student records — meal eligibility, active orders of protection — so they can respond in the moment.
Processing foster care placements, updating housing records, ensuring the school's data is complete and compliant.
Monitoring compliance across an entire district, identifying schools behind on updates, drilling into any school's data when issues arise.
Three roles with different content, permissions, and workflows — what each person sees depends on their responsibilities.
Project structure
The legacy systems
Before OASIS, staff relied on STARS — a command-line interface with text-based navigation — and a basic Windows application with simple forms. Neither was designed for modern compliance requirements.
The daily reality
A school admin processing a foster care placement might check one system for housing status, another for orders of protection, and a spreadsheet for meal eligibility — all while ensuring privacy compliance across disconnected tools.
Three systems, manual cross-referencing
Eight categories from foster care to meal codes — each with its own data model, compliance rules, and edge cases. All needed to feel like one product.
Three roles touch the same data but need entirely different views, permissions, and workflows. One-size-fits-all would fail usability and privacy.
Each sub-module had its own compliance team, SMEs, and DOE program office — aligning them required constant communication and iterative reviews.
Challenge
Eight sub-modules with different data types could easily become eight separate products. Staff deal with high-stakes, time-sensitive situations — relearning the interface for each record type adds cognitive load where it matters most.
Solution
I designed a consistent pattern — list view → detail page → add/edit → history — across all 8 sub-modules. Staff who learn one category can navigate any other without retraining. This pattern later scaled to 4+ additional modules.
List → detail → add/edit → history
Different modules, same pattern
Challenge
Meal code compliance lived in standalone PDFs, per-school spreadsheets, and manual cross-referencing. Center users had no aggregated view — they checked compliance school by school, manually cross-referencing PDF reports.
Solution
I redesigned the information architecture into role-appropriate views:
Teachers · Classroom
Meal eligibility records — just what they need to respond in the moment.
School Admins · Building-wide
Complete meal code data — update records, resolve discrepancies, run reports.
Center Users · Multi-school
Aggregate compliance dashboard — drill down to any school when needed.
Challenge
The original guardian information design worked for simple cases — one or two guardians. As requirements grew, more guardian types and fields needed accommodating. The initial layout couldn't absorb the growth.
Solution
I redesigned guardian info as structured cards: name and actions at top, scrollable detail area, clear separation between entries. Whether one guardian or six, the layout stays organized and scannable.
Structured cards that scale with data
What previously required navigating 5-6 separate screens now lives in one unified interface.
The interaction model designed for 8 sub-modules scaled to 4+ additional modules without redesign.
Staff trained on one category could navigate all others immediately — because every sub-module follows the same pattern.
Live and serving staff who manage safety records for 1.1 million students across NYC's public school system.
"Huchong is a talented and thoughtful UX designer with a strong sense of clarity and consistency. He simplifies complex problems with ease and delivers user-centric solutions with professionalism and calm focus. Any team would benefit from his design maturity and collaborative spirit."
"Huchong is a talented and highly reliable UI/UX designer. I oversaw his work on an expansive project with the NYC Department of Education, and he consistently delivered quality work in a timely manner in a high-pressure environment. I would gladly work with him again on future projects."
"Huchong is a talented UX Designer who's always approachable and willing to help. He consistently delivered quality work on time and made collaboration effortless — truly one of the best to work with. His reliability, creativity, and supportive nature make him an asset to any team."
Cognitive load isn't just a UX problem — it's a safety problem. Shared patterns mean staff focus on the student, not the interface.
Different compliance teams for each sub-module meant defining the right problem depended on asking the right questions. Review decks became the alignment tool.
Federal and city regulations shaped every default state and permission level. Privacy wasn't a constraint — it was a core design material from the start.
