Understanding the Problem
Prior to this work, there were three independent student-made course planning apps, but these had three main pain points:
-
Difficult or impossible to keep track of graduation requirements for each major and/or minor in these apps
-
Frustrating to transfer courses and plans between apps (one was for semester planning, another for 4 year plan)
-
Had to use an addition Google Doc/Excel to keep track of courses interested in, but can't fit in current plan
Research
-
User Interviews
-
Journey Map
-
How Might We Qs
-
User Personas
-
Affinity Map
-
Impact vs. Effort Grid
Main research takeaway was to streamline the process in one app with:
-
all course information and ratings
-
the ability to plan multiple academic paths
-
a place to store interesting classes that can't fit into schedule
Initial Designs
After research, we decided to create a three part app: 4 year planning, semester planning, and course information pages. My page to design was the 4 year planner.
Key components of the 4 year planner:
-
Multiple degree plans (upper middle ORF and COS)
-
Requirement tree (far right)
-
Bookmarks (bottom middle)
Prototyping
We ran user interviews on our hi-fidelity prototype to test different icons and concepts. We ended up changing our expand to semester view icon and added a more comprehensive filter on the semester view.
Next Steps
The engineers are currently developing our app and it should be available soon.
Impact & Key Learnings
This app will be used by over 5,000 undergraduate and graduate Princeton students and will replace all other course planning apps.
​
This was my first larger-team project and I learned:
-
Realistic design (impact vs. effort grid, what is actually able to be developed by engineers)
-
Always refer back to the research