Class Critique App
Student Project at GVSU
Understanding user needs through research and design iteration
Overview
We designed Class Critique, an app that helps college students choose courses with verified professor and class reviews. We conducted user interviews, created user flows, and iterated on feedback from usability testing. The final design improved clarity around scheduling and provided a reliable, student-centered way to find the right courses.
The problem
College students often find the process of selecting courses overwhelming and confusing. Currently, students rely on unverified online reviews, advisor recommendations, and word of mouth with varying levels of success. Students want to find courses that provide a learning experience that fits their needs and helps them thrive.
Possible solution
An app designed to provide verified course and professor reviews from official post-semester student evaluations. Reviews include information students really want to know including class structure, professor personality, and course difficulty level providing an easy, reliable way to find the right fit.
Design process
Empathize phase
Throughout the empathize phase we conducted user interviews to understand their pain points and desires around the course selection process.
User interviews:
We interviewed potential users over Zoom to understand how Grand Valley State University students choose their courses. A few sample questions include:
Tell me about your process for picking classes.
What resources do you use in that process? How effective were they in helping you make a decision?
When choosing a course, what type of information is most important for you to know about it?
Have you ever switched sections of a course or disliked a course at GVSU? If so, what was your reason?
What information about a professor would you like to know before taking their class?
What we found:
Students mainly use Rate My Professor to learn about courses and professors.
Some students relied solely on their advisors to choose their courses.
Others chose courses based on friends' experiences.
Students' top priorities guiding course selection include teaching style, class structure, and professor personality.
Currently, students feel frustrated by the lack of verified reviews online and find current solutions difficult to navigate.
Define phase
Ideal persona
With the data collected from the interviews, we created the Inquisitive Isabel persona, a student representing potential app users. This persona helped us understand user goals and frustrations to better shape their experience.
Ideate phase
User flow
We designed the user flow in FigJam to show how users may navigate through the app to find course or professor reviews and add them to their schedule.
Prototype phase
Wireframes
To better convey the design goals, we created simple hand drawn wireframes to show the intended outcome.
Visual designs
From these low-fidelity wireframes I began designing the Class Critique app in Figma.
Test phase
Usability testing
After the initial design was created, we tested the prototype with users to understand areas of improvement. Participants were asked to complete the following tasks while we observed their navigation process.
Find the course rating page for Professor Tia Barrera
Find a Tuesday/Thursday Psychology 101 course taught by Tia Barrera and add it to your schedule
Contact support and send a message
User journey
During usability testing we tracked the users process while completing each task. Below represents a user journey of participant number one finding a course rating page for Professor Tia Barrera.
Participant feedback
The phrase “add it to your schedule” confused all participants because there was no clear schedule page in the original design.
When clicking “add” on the calendar page users would expect that the times for that class would be blocked off on the calendar.
Adding a course to your calendar should be an option from the search and course rating pages.
Implementing feedback
Recommendation 1
We changed the name of the “Calendar” page to “Schedule”. Updating this microcopy should inform students that scheduling is an option.
Recommendation 2
We updated the calendar page so now it shows blocked off class times when a course is added to someone’s schedule.
Recommendation 3
We added "see calendar" buttons leading to the Schedule page. These buttons were added to the Search Results page and Professor Ratings page. This addition makes it clearer that a scheduling option exists and improves navigation to it.
Final thoughts
This project offered the opportunity to practice many valuable UX related skills including: writing microcopy, conducting research, usability testing, and designing in Figma. I also gained a deeper understanding of the importance of user feedback and learned how implementing it can enhance user experience.