Uni Tracker
A simple academic progress tracker built for New Zealand university students.
- Status
- Live
- Launched
- June 2026
- Built with
- JavaScript, HTML, Supabase, Vercel
- Links
- Live site
Overview
Uni Tracker is a simple academic progress tracker built for New Zealand university students. It started as a way to solve my own problem, and became the first thing I shipped to a meaningful group of users.
The problem
Keeping track of university progress sounds straightforward until grades start being spread across different papers, semesters and assessment systems.
I wanted a simple way to see how I was actually doing, without maintaining spreadsheets or repeatedly calculating grades and GPA by hand.
Existing student tools tended to be either overly complicated, or designed around overseas grading systems that didn't map well to my experience as a New Zealand university student. So I built Uni Tracker.
What I built
Uni Tracker gives students one place to record their papers, assessments and results, and to see how those results affect their overall academic progress.
The first version was designed around the New Zealand grading system and my own experience studying at Massey University. The aim was deliberately simple: entering and understanding your grades shouldn't become another university assignment.
Key features
- Papers and marks
- Add the papers you're taking and log marks as they come in.
- GPA
- Calculated for you on the New Zealand / Massey scale.
- Upcoming deadlines
- See what's due next across every paper.
- Target grades
- Shows exactly what you need on each remaining assignment to reach the grade you want.
- Degree progress
- Credits completed against the total the degree requires.
- Paper status
- Each paper is either in progress or complete with its final grade.
Interesting problems
From personal tool to real users
I built Uni Tracker for myself first. Once it was working, I shared it with the Massey distance-learning community to see whether anyone else would find it useful. They did: around 75 people signed up within the first 12 hours, and it later passed 100 registered users. That turned it from something designed around my own assumptions into something used by people with different papers, workloads and ways of tracking their study.
What real usage exposed
Real users found things that are hard to anticipate when you're building alone: where onboarding wasn't clear, edge cases in how people set up their papers, and how important it is that academic data is understandable at a glance.
Decisions & trade-offs
Keep data entry lightweight
A grade tracker is only useful if entering grades is easier than calculating them yourself. I deliberately avoided turning Uni Tracker into a full learning-management system, and kept the focus on what students actually want to know: what have I completed, how am I doing, and what does that mean for my overall progress?
Design for the local system
Rather than trying to support every grading system at once, the first release focused on the New Zealand / Massey context I understood. That kept the product manageable while solving the original problem properly.
Make progress visible
Individual assessment grades are useful, but students care about the bigger picture. The interface is designed to show performance across papers and over time, rather than a database of disconnected numbers.
Outcome
- signups in the first 12 hours
- ~75
- registered users
- 100+
More than 100 registered users, with around 75 signing up within roughly 12 hours of sharing it with the wider student community.
Most importantly, Uni Tracker solved the problem I originally built it for, and showed that other students had the same problem.
What I learned
The biggest lesson wasn't technical. It was how quickly a product changes once people other than its creator start using it.
Things that seem obvious when you've designed every screen aren't necessarily obvious to someone opening the app for the first time, and real users find combinations and edge cases you don't naturally run into yourself.
Getting more than 100 people to sign up for something that began as a weekend project made Uni Tracker an important step from building projects to shipping products.
Tech
- JavaScript
- HTML
- Supabase
- Vercel