Class Star
Course registration system redesign to let students take control of their waitlist
UX Design Responsive Web Design Customer Journey Map
For this project, we were challenged to dig out problems along a student’s journey from receiving the acceptance letter to the arrival at campus of Carnegie Mellon University(CMU). We were asked to pick up a problem and solve it with a responsive website innovatively. Class Star is the solution we came up with to solve the waitlist problem during course registration for new admitted students. We turned waitlist into exchangable spots and changed the suffering experience into an enjoyable one.
Date: Autumn 2016, 3 weeks
Team: Xiaonan Chen, James Yan
My Role: Researcher, Designer
01 Guerrilla Research
What problems are there along a student’s journey to CMU?
We conducted guerrilla research with one undergraduate student and two graduate students to learn their journey to CMU. Based on the interview, we made an as-is customer journey map depicting all the stages that a student might come across on his or her journey to the university. Among all the action, we defined three problem spaces.
Guerrilla Reserch: get it fast, get it for free.
Sam
19 years old
Sophomore
Native resident
Shirley
26 years old
First-year graduate student
Native resident
Ying
24 years old
Second-year graduate student
International student
Problem Space 1:
Previous house selling
"The process of selling old house is stressful because I don't have good legal advice to help me negotiate."
Problem Space 3:
Renting new house/apartment
“I don’t have time to fly to Pittsburgh to check the house situation.”
“We asked for a few pictures remotely, but hard to tell it’s a good place or not.”
Problem Space 3:
Course registration
“So many people on the waitlist. I don’t know if I can get into the class.”
“I kept auditing all classes that I was interested in to keep tracking. This is exhausted.”
After looking into all the problem spaces and considering the medium we were required to use — responsive website, we finally decided that the third problem space — course registration — was the most appropriate one to focus.
02 Synthesis
What’s wrong with the current course registration system?
Students have difficulties in making decision in course registration, which makes them confused and frustrated. The difficulties are mainly in two aspects:
1) It’s hard to make decision on which course to take due to the lack of course information and feedback from previous students;
2) It’s hard to make decision on whether to stay on a course waitlist because students have no idea on the chances that they could get into the course.
We kept looking into the two aspects, and found out that the first one could basically be solved through communication with professors and other students. While the second one, waitlist, was the hard one to solve.
Waitlist is the main cause of anixety, because students don’t have much knowledge and control over it.
Students on waitlist don’t know if they can get into the course. They can only wait and hope.
Students who resigter late stay at the bottom of waitlist, so they basically have no chance to get in even if they have an extremely strong desire towards the course.
03 Ideation
How might we increase students’ control over their waitlist?
The current waitlist system follows the following rules:
Ordered by registration time. It follows “first come first serve” rule, but registration time for different students are randomly distributed, which might result unfairness.
Maximum waitlist 5 courses. Each student can waitlist 5 courses at most.
No communication ways among students. Students on waitlist are not able to know other students’ thoughts or preference towards the course.
Don’t show the chances for getting in. So students can only wait and hope to get a spot.
“Reframing is a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way.”
— Jon Kolko
After several rounds of ideation, we came up with this idea to make the waitlist spots into something exchangeable, and give them “price” by measuring a student’s desire towards the course. The stronger desire a student has, the higher “price” he or she would love to “pay” for the spot.
Under the envisioned system, the waitlist follows the following rules:
Ordered by preference and use stars to mesuare it. We take out registration time factor out of current system, and instead, order waitlist spots based on students’ preference measured by stars. Each student will be given 10 stars before class registration starts.
Droplist and waitlist. We let students know who is considering dropping a course by creating a droplist. Students who have already registered a class but considering dropping it put their names on the drop list, so waitlist students could know their chances of getting into the course.
Automatic exchange system. At a certain time of the day, the system will automatically match waitlist students with droplist students based on their relative position. The exchange is daily until the end of course registration period.
Chat function. Students on waitlist have no way to know other students’ thoughts or preference towards the course.
What would the future course registration process be like?
With the envisioned system in mind, we imagined the future course registration process and made a new future customer journey map, within which no pain points exist during course registration for CMU students.
04 Prototype
Use class stars to measure students’ preference towards a course, instead of registration time.
Manage waitlist course and assign class stars strategically.
Check droplist to know the chance for getting into your favourate course.
Communicate anytime and anywhere to know others’ thoughts about a course.
Take control of your waitlist, get rid of uncertainties, and stop worrying.
05 Reflection
1. Reframing is not only a method, but also an attitude for pushing design. In this project, I first learned how to envision a preferred future with “reframing”, and it greatly changed my way of observing things. As Jon Kolko, the founder of Austin Center for Design, describes, reframing is a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way. It is such a powerful tool to midwife client’s desiderata, which could never been imagined at the beginning, either by client or designer. Besides, reframing should also be used as an attitute across all design stages. Always believe that “I’m working on the wrong thing” and open to all possiblilities would help discover better paths.
2. Combining two models as design instruction. In this design, we followed two design models: the analysis-synthesis bridge model (left) and the double diamond model (right). I find that combining the two models is a quite effective way to walk through the process, since they instruct me to be aware of where to continuously push and where to stop and make a decision.
3. Metaphor of objects should reflect user’s mental model in reality. In this project, we first used badges instead of stars to represent student’s preference. But the feedback we got from students show that badges would cause some confusion, since it represents some kind of accomplishment in most cases. So finally we changed to stars - a more appropriate representation for preference. In our design, everything we use should confirm with users’ mental model and image in real life to reduce users’ mental burden when using our product.