Winter, 2020
A web platform that simplifies the transfer credit process
Creating a better way for students to save time and money on their path to graduation.
Product Details
About ClassFindr
An early-stage, edtech startup that is creating a platform that allows students to look beyond their own school and design their own pathways to graduation.
Problem
Every semester, college students are forced to prolong their college experience because a class or credit that they need for graduation isn’t being offered by their college or university at a time that matches their needs and schedule.
Challenge
How might we allow students to take courses from various accredited institutions which gives students more flexibility with costs, schedule, etc. and therefore would help them to graduate on time.
Goal
Allowing students to take courses at different accredited institutions will allow them to graduate on time while reducing costs.
Objective
Design a product that will allow students to easily search for and transfer classes at various institutions in order to fulfill graduation requirements at a home school.
Role
UX/UI Designer: Interaction Design, Prototyping, Visual Design, User Research, Usability Test
Teams
Project Manager, & Research Lead
Tools
Figma
Landscape Analysis
First we look for opportunities and challenges.
Basically, it’s complicated.
The Credit Transfer process is different at each individual school.
There are significant restrictions on taking courses at other institutions.
There are cumbersome approval processes for attending other schools.
Initial User Insights
We wanted to get insights and their pain points from potential users so we conducted 11 interviews.
What has the process of fulfilling graduation requirements been like?
What has been helpful?
What have been some pain points?
What do you wish you had known before?
Overall, the registration process was Challenging for students. They found it stressful and inefficient, not all students take advantage of using advisors, most of the students receive conflicting information, and want simplicity.
Advisors recognize the problems they face too and they have some solutions (waitlist), but they aren’t always enough.
Personas
We used the information from the interviews to create user personas for our target audience to help guide our process.
Laura is a university student, who wants to graduate on time and finds the class registration process difficult because her required classes fill up quickly.
Charles is a university advisor, who wants to help students with transferring their credits and find a way to make that process easier. But his concern is class contents update frequently and amount of people that it goes through before it’s finally approved.
Outcomes
If graduating on time and concerns about cost were major pain points, what gap was there that we could fill? we found in our research surrounding graduation completion rates and the need to take classes to fulfill their requirements, students would take classes at other universities, but there wasn’t a seamless way to take classes at other school and ensure the credits are transferable
Early Explorations
We started with a mobile app where users could search for classes at other schools and add classes and track their progress.
Low-Fidelity Concept
First, we made this huge changes, mobile vs web. It wasn’t really that the feature changed . What we decide in the first iterations and design was just some basic placeholders, navigation bars, etc.
A place for a request form, some space for a profile, the usual stuff.
Things that we had taken for UI audits of existing platforms, but with ClassFindrs key features built in.
Class search Sort
Search Result
Student Profile
Final deliverable
After countless rounds of iterations and product team reviews, we added some feature to the dashboard, we made the comparison of the classes a little more clear we created a strolling feature to kind of help the user make sense of the site right away. Also ended up changing the mission/branding statement to make the search class feature crystal clear to the user and most importantly , we highlighted the use of the search feature right away.
Search Class/Courses
This feature can help students to find available courses from different universities faster. Students will have the freedom to choose from the classes that they will be taking, university they want to attend, and class schedule.
Advance Filter Search
This feature allows users to narrow down the courses they’re seeing, it locate information faster, keeping them engaged, and increasing overall user satisfaction.
Course Information:
Student Dashboard
This feature will show the students information. Students can view their pending request on their profile, view class report, review added course materials, and students can add their weekly schedule.
Next Steps & Recommendations
Integrate partner school databases with the product. This was considered a basic expectation during user testing.
Create a direct registration feature for partner schools. This is a potential source of monetization as ClassFindr could charge a fee for this convenience.
Build out a separate app once the core platform is established. The app should allow for direct communication with advisors and the registrar's office, as well as provide a continuously updated roadmap to graduation.
