https://www.courseplan.io
CoursePlan Recommendations
Cornell DTI
Helping students make more informed decisions for enrollment.
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
Feb 2023 - May 2023
1 Product Manager
1 Marketing Manager
5 Engineers
1 Designer
TOOLS
Figma
FigJam
Notion
Slack
TIMELINE
CONTEXT
What is CoursePlan?
CoursePlan (courseplan.io) is a web application created by Cornell Digital Technology & Innovation, a student-run, open-source, software design and development team. Since it’s launch in Fall 2019, CoursePlan has had over 6,500 users and currently has over 4,000 active users. CoursePlan was built to -
Help students plan their 4 years while tracking graduation requirements.
I worked in a team of 6 students consisting of 1 product manager, 1 marketing manager, 5 engineers, and 1 designer to design a new course recommendation feature with the objective of making the schedule planning experience more efficient and increase user retention.
PRODUCT PROBLEM
CoursePlan needs to offer more to help students and retain users
Every fall semester, CoursePlan receives an influx of about 1.6k new users. However, only 1.1k of the 1.6k returned after initial engagement. Because of our struggle to retain a large part of our new users every year, our team felt we needed to offer more to help our users have a more efficient and smooth planning experience.
USER RESEARCH
How do students plan?
With an initial idea to improve CoursePlan to be more than just a planning platform, my product manager and I set out to interview 5 active users over Zoom and in-person about their experience using CoursePlan. We also interviewed them about their experience planning their schedule and looked at our analytics.
We then aggregated our findings into related groups in an affinity diagram.
INSIGHTS
There are multiple factors that affect a student's decision to enroll in a class.
“As a pre-med student, I think about sequencing and fulfilling my pre-med requirements first, and then choosing a class that would be most useful to me in the future.”
“I usually just take the classes that my friends are going to take, but if I find a class that’s interesting, I’ll go ahead and take it.
Students rely heavily on word-of-mouth or the internet.
“Everyone knows that you should take ASTRO 1102 for a physics requirement because it’s easy, interesting, and Bill Nye guest lectures it.”
“It’s kind of annoying that I have to cross check every class with RateMyProfessor or search up what the easiest class for a requirement is on Reddit.”
There is nothing to help users choose a class
“I use CoursePlan as sort of a course catalog for requirements, but because the list of courses aren’t in any particular order, it’s hard to choose a class just straight from there since there are so many.”
Brainstorming Features
From our research, we learned that students find planning out their four years stressful and time-consuming. While also looking at their behavior patterns, we identified three possible solution spaces:
1. A recommendation feature based on popular classes for each requirement
✅ Helps user make more informed decisions when choosing classes
✅ Classes shown backed by data
❌ Not enough data for more niche requirements
2. Indicator for notoriously easy classes
❌ Classes previous students have said are easy may have become harder (outdated information)
❌ Low impact
3. Display outsourced information on course cards to help students save time from doing addition research
✅ Feasible
❌ Doesn’t encourage user engagement on CoursePlan
❌ Possibly outdated information
Final Feature
After evaluating the pros and cons of each feature, I decided to design recommendations to show popular classes taken for each requirement. This would help the user make more informed decisions when planning out their years, while also increasing user engagement.
FOUNDATIONS
Information Hierarchy
In order to seamlessly integrate recommendations into a user’s planning flow, I incorporated the recommendations feature into the entry point where users would be selecting classes to add to each requirement, which is under the requirement tracker sidebar. Because we would be basing our recommendations on our data of the courses that are most used to fulfill a certain requirement, the recommendation feature would have to be built off of each requirement.
EXPLORATIONS
Showing Popular Courses in the Requirements Sidebar
I focused on the two main parts of our UI where users access courses to add to their semester — under each requirement dropdown and the more comprehensive list of courses.
The current UI displays two to four randomly selected courses under each requirement. From our research, we found that many users ignore those courses because they don’t know what course the prefix and number represents.
Because this is a user’s first impression of what courses could fulfill their requirements, the space needed to be use more effectively.
Iteration 1 displays a full-sized course card of the most popular class used to fulfill that requirement, supported by statistics from our own data and from our sister product, CU Reviews.
I decided to not move forward with this design because it does not use effective use of the small space available on the sidebar, and the statistics, though may be useful, may be outdated and makes the side bar look visually dense.
I decided to go with iteration 3 because it makes the most effective use of the space by displaying the two most popular courses for that requirement and its course prefix and the course name, while not making the sidebar look visually overwhelming and dense. This gives the user more information on what the courses are, not just a prefix and number.
With that in mind, I explored multiple iterations that displayed popular courses for each requirement.
Iteration 2 links the most popular courses in the description of the requirement. However, we found from user testing that most users ignore the description under each requirement. Thus, this was not the most effective way to show popular courses.
Showing Popular courses in the Course List
The comprehensive course list is the second part of the UI where the user would see courses that fulfill a specific requirement. I explored showing the most popular courses on this list through sectioning, icons and hover states, and links.
I decided to move forward with iteration C. After discussing with my team, we came to the conclusion that if we were basing our popularity ranking off of the courses that are used the most to fulfill specific requirements, we could use the same formula to apply to all the courses on the list. Thus, it would end up as a list of courses sorted by descending popularity, which I found to be much more useful than separating a few popular courses or using an icon.
With this in mind, I decided to expand on that idea of sorting and include a filtering feature and a search bar within the lists.
This would make it much easier for users to find specific courses, and easily find lower or upper level courses for requirements.
FINAL EXPERIENCE
Final Prototype
Looking Forward
After this feature’s development is completed in Spring 2023, I hope to conduct user testing to measure its impact on user engagement and CoursePlan’s overall effectiveness in helping students plan their semesters at Cornell.
If I had more time, I would like to conduct more extensive user research and explore the realm of inserting student quotes directly into course recommendations.