schedulr
A four-year class organizer for the diligent student.
Problem: Students often struggle to plan out their class schedules for their four years in college. It is difficult to organize which classes they need to take, when is the best time to take certain classes, and tracking progress with distribution and foundation requirements. Due to the lack of other class organization tools, students typically create their own Excel spreadsheet to track their academic progress.
Approach: We found there was a need for a third party scheduling application that will plan out and organize a student's four year schedule and keep track of their various requirements.
Solution: Our product provides a centralized platform enabling the student to easily plan their four year schedule and to ensure the completion of all foundation, distribution, major, and minor requirements. Our app will also provide schedule recommendations wiht the opportunity to see and make reviews for classes and professors. As a third party platform, we invite Universities to purchase in order to motivate and improve students' registration requirements
Why will this work? Our app will provide the best platform to allow college students to focus on what is important: their classes and work at hand - rather than stressing about their long term schedule and needed requirements
Goal: understand user needs
Our survey results allowed us to focus in on particular pain points shared throughout the Tufts student community. We were able to understand current methods of tracking classes and requirements, likes and dislikes, level of frustration with their current methods, and needed features and functions.
With our survey we asked 57 Tufts students about their methods of organization and process of scheduling corses for upcoming semesters.
28% of students said they have no organization system.
72% of students said they use an Excel spreadsheet or have their own ways of tracking their schedule.
We then asked what features or functions they would find helpful when organizing their four year class plan and some of the feed back we got included...
“Once you pick a major, you should very quickly figure out when you will take each of the major requirements”
“A visualization of all 4 years and the ability to move courses around to see how things would look/work”
“Distribution requirements and whether or not they have been completed should be displayed.”
“There needs to be more knowledge about requirements”
We also asked what they liked or dislike about the organization method they use and some of the answers we received included...
“It’s hard to know what I still need to take for my major and graduation requirements"
“It doesn’t show how many credits I have and what I need and I could easily mess it up”
“There's no way for me to automatically verify classes and requirements with SIS. Since it's a local file on my computer, it doesn't automatically update or sync with SIS or degree requirements.”
“Hard to keep track of requirements”
User expected functions and needs for the app included...
Users want major and minor requirements clearly accessible
Users want the ability to manipulate classes between semesters
Users like to see a visual representation of all four years
Users want to to know when classes are offered and which professors are ideal
Using the responses we received, we were able to determine user needs, requirements, and influences for our next prototype.
User Research
Initial Concept Wireframe
Usability Testing
After understanding basic user needs and requirements, and developing a prototype, we performed usability tests with our clickable Balsamiq prototype on 5 Tufts students. In the test we asked participants to complete three tasks
1) Find second year class schedule
2) Find the course description for PSY1
3) Edit your profile as if you were going to double major in Engineering Psychology and Biology.
Participants did not like this as a "home screen". They wished to see a more defined home, with their current schedule for example.
Participants thought the drop-down was a bit confusing and did not realize the function.
Participants wanted to see more information about the specific class here - such as who the professor was that semester, how many credit hours it is and how often it is offered.
Brand
Final Prototype
After multiple rounds of usability testing with Tufts students and the feedback received from the survey, we generated our final prototype. Here are some screens from the high fidelity clickable.
What's next for SCHEDULR?
We would love to have the app sync with the student schedule from the college website, so things like GPA, declared major(s)/minor(s), advisors, previously taken classes, etc. can be implemented into the app automatically.
Additionally, we want to have a system that tracks the student’s progress with all requirements and creates visuals, like graphs and tables, to show the student what requirements they have completed, which requirements are in progress, and which they have yet to be fulfill.
Meet the Team
Hannah Reynolds
Architectural Studies
Tufts Class 2019
Benson Cheng
Computer Science
Tufts Class 2020
Olivia Wentzell
Engineering Psychology
Tufts Class 2020
Molly Campbell
Engineering Psychology
Tufts Class 2020