As students, we believe that both education and job-finding industry are not transparent enough. People don’t know what it really feels like to take a class or work at a company, yet there is a huge opportunity cost when people make a wrong pick. Entrepreneurs had built Glassdoor and Blind to help employee out, but what about students? We've all regretted taking some classes because we didn't know enough about it ahead of time. Now let's solve that by giving student honest and accurate courses reviews and get them the right classes they want.
Problems we want to solve
Today, students gather course information from two sources: the official college source and peers. At our school, the official course page received little maintenance and didn't have any valuable information for students. On the other side, students asking their peers via message or forums often receive incomplete and subjective responses, which could lead to biased comments toward a course and potentially students missing out on good fit
Understanding students
We conducted 100 surveys and 20 + interviews with students around what they want when picking courses. We defined informative, complete, and honest as the three key points that students value. Students want to make sure a course gets reviewed in multiple perspective and verified by peers (complete); the course reviews are as objective as possible (honest); and that the course information can immediately help students make a decision. (informative)
Designing a course review platform
Find the right course
I created a visual course card system to communicate course information. Students can glance at basic course rating when hovering over the cards
Learn about the course
We defined 4 types of courses metrics and visualized them individually to give students a intuitive and comprehensive look into a course
Submit a review
I made the submission form as easy as possible and added fun micro interactions to encourage people to completion a review
How I got there
I started off defining the most critical information students want at each stage of the user journey. I want to give students to right amount of info clue and to help them progress
I then used different visual components to customize how information are presented at each stage
I used session time and CTR as key metric. I consider the product a success if students are quickly navigating to the course they want and spending extensive time learning more about the course.
Result
Classy was launched during Fall 2020’s registration period and reached around 1000 CSE students in the first week. We gained positive design feedback on the platform and have good retention rate throughout the registration season. Our next step is to include more courses and hire more students to join the team
Feedbacks from surveys
Reflections
Good design are not expensive Shipping a product requires team work. Good hand off processes, designs that balancing quality and budget, and having enough empathy toward teammates are all important to being a designer.
Focus on the problem, not the solution You can’t get to the perfect solution in one try. (not always at least) In every iteration there’s a problem to solve. Think about how each of them would contribute to a better experience as a whole.
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