All students at Northeastern University use a a tool called the Degree Audit as well as Excel spreadsheet templates given by academic advisors to help them plan out their coursework for the next 4 years of college.
The combination of the confusing Degree Audit and several Excel Spreadsheets leave many students feeling overwhelmed. There is also a lack of responsive academic advisors to help each student figure out their plan of studies.
This leaves students feeling lost on their own and more likely to make mistakes in their plans
Students can now create their custom plan of studies with easy drag & drops and understandable UI. After launching the beta app in Fall 2023, we have since started getting many feedback & bug requests from the school community! Now, I work to address user feedback by quickly shipping designs that are technically feasible.
Many classes will require pre-requisites (class you must take beforehand) and/or co-requisites (classes you must take together). When a student places a class that needs either of those but is missing in their plan, they will receive an error and when clicked on, a modal with a diagram will pop up. However, the diagram that tells this information on pre/co-reqs is difficult and complex due to the many conditionals that are often nested in one another.
How might we easily show students what complex combinations of classes they must take?
While the app is great for accurately building a course of plan based on Northeastern's requirements, GraduateNU had no customizable functionality that would cater to each individual's unique plan.
How might we integrate a way to customize one's plan according to unique needs?
How might we show users both major and minor requirements without overwhelming the UI?
With the ability to toggle between major and minor requirements, all the requirements can be replaced which saves real estate in the side bar and prevents endless scrolling. In addition to the tabs added in the sidebar of a user's plan, I added usability of minors in the modals where a user creates a new plan and modifies a plan.
It is more than likely students will be uncertain and change their mind several times throughout their college career. However, even if they don't know what course exactly they may be taking, they may definitely want to know what requirements they would be fulfilling.
How might we account for users unsure about their future courses?
SearchNEU holds data on class details, professors, classrooms, times, and gives students the power to enable notifications for when seats open. Despite how intertwined the two apps are, they had no connections to one another.
How might we direct users to learn more about classes at another app in a technically feasible way?
The most simple and scalable design solution was adding info icons next to each class which when clicked on, would open a new tab of SearchNEU where a user can learn more about that class!
