ClassFindr is an edTech startup dedicated to the empowerment of students. Encourage students to explore outside their college and create their own graduation paths. Within the current COVID situation, it is a perfect time for students to take charge and discover alternative ways to complete their degrees.
ClassFindr
Setup
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Team members:
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Interaction Lead: Joe Chao(me)
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Research Lead: Lizzie Bridges
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Planning Lead: Julia Armbrust
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Timeline: 16 days
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Target Device: Desktop, Laptop
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Tool: Miro, Figma, Google sheet, Google Form, Optimalworkshop, Calendly
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UX Tool: Survey, Interview, Affinity Map, Competitive Analysis, Persona, design studio, sketch, user flow, wire flow, wireframe, prototype, user testing.
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Challenges:
Research and define the core pain points for students with their college registration process and build a website to streamline the process for students to establish their unique graduation paths.
Design Process: Our design process can be divided into 2 parts
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Research Stage
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Ideate Stage
Business Model
we put together an early business model canvas based on what we knew about Classfinder and established the whos and whats
Business Model
Research Stage
Right after we understood our direction and challenges, our team did a comparison and competitive research into its direct competitors in order to find out how we can make the most impact in this field.
Competitive Research
Screen Survey / Interview
At the meantime, our team filtered as many interviewees, who had experience in the course registration process, as possible based on the screener survey, and interviewed a total of 10 people, age 20 – 34, 6 females and 4 males. For the next step, we gathered the information from our interviews to create an affinity map to better understand our users and identify any potential pain points.
Screen Survey
Affinity Map
As I went through the affinity mapping, I found some interesting numbers.
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60% of our interviewees believed that schedule is one of the most significant factors in choosing classes.
5 out of 10 of the interviewees will look up the professor of the course before they decide to register or not, that makes it the second most important factor among all imterviewees.
6 out of 10 of the interviewees mentioned that the platform they used to register the course are hard to navigate and complicated.
Affinity Map
User Story
Moreover, we settled on a few critical user stories that we knew we wanted to include in our project, along with persona, we are able to focus on what our users truly want and build the right features for them. As a result, we conclude and define our problem statement based on the findings of our research and study.
Persona:Kimmie
User Story
Persona:Jeff
Problem Statement
College students need a streamlined way to access, compare, and register for course alternatives outside of their home institutions because of a lack of guarantee that the courses they need or want to take are available.
MOSCOW
However, as we discussed all the features, we soon realized that within the timeline we had, we were not able to build everything. Thus, we applied the MOSCOW method in order to evaluate our priorities in this project. We will focus on the user experience of students’ side, and work on search classes, communicate with advisors, dashboard, and Sign up & Onboarding.
MOSCOW
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Ideate Stage
For this stage, it can easily be divided into three parts:
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sketch & low-fidelity wireframe
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high-fidelity prototype
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user testing & iterate
Sketch
We sketched our ideas in a unique, extremely creative process known as Design Studio. We ran several rounds of design studios to come up with our first drafts of onboarding, message, and user dashboard.
I love the process since we can all get the chance to show each one of us in the team our own vision in different parts, and it is a great great way to communicate our idea! Then, pick the best out of us and put the parts all together.
Design Studio
Component Library
As an interaction lead in the team, I start to build our component library and have our style guild for our team ready to use.
Style Guild
Usability Testing
Our team moves smoothly from sketch toward low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes.
Right after we have our very first prototype from the wireframe, we put it into user testings with 6 different people, asked some questions, and see how it really goes with our users, and most importantly, feedback!
we gather all the feedback and made some reasonable changes, for example, on our course detail page, users were saying the background color is too close to the card’s color, making them hard to focus on the main content, so we change the background color to white.
What changes
Prototype
Here's the prototype!
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Next Steps
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further research & iterate
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focus on administors’ side of the project
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mobile prototype
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We want to continue investigating and iterating on our prototype as the next stage. We didn’t manage to speak with anyone who is an administrator at a college, therefore we would want to find more interviewees. We’d also like to create a mobile prototype and collaborate with the creators of classfindr to launch the site.
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While Classfindr may work as a stand-alone web software, connecting with other institutions’ course scheduling and advising platforms would truly elevate Classfindr and set us apart from our competition!
Take Away & Final Thought
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What I learned during the project is that planning out the project timeline is quite important as we go through each stage. It kept our work on schedule and reminded us to move toward our goal.
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Moreover, the design studio is a powerful tool when it’s time to either communicate between teammates and create sketches. I loved how short the time is given in the design studio so that I can focus on putting down all the ideas I had in mind and share them with others.
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Also, a component library can definitely help our design under the same style, but the timing to build the library is elusive. As we move from low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes. I realized I had to change some components to make it fit into the page.
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I would like to thank my truly AMAZING team: Lizzie Bridges for her positive energy and always bringing out some brilliant ideas for our project, and Julia Armbrust, who prepared the project Gantt Chart for us to start super strong and had everything organized!!
