A feature that assists users in creating multiple different plans for 4 years at Cornell.
CoursePlan allows Cornell students to plan out their four-year schedules and track their progress toward completing their major requirements. I worked on a feature called "Multiple Plans" that would give students the opportunity to build and visualize various four-year plans and figure out which ones worked best for them to pursue.
When I joined CoursePlan as a designer, it was already an established product on campus, with 3000+ monthly users. The designers before me had already conducted user research that supported their claim that students wanted to experiment with different four-year plans to see the different ways they could schedule their semesters, explore what pursuing alternate concentrations may look like, and what different elective courses they could take, without having to change their original planned schedule. This is where the need for a new feature, "Multiple Plans" arose from.
Although the previous designers had established there was a user need for the 'Multiple Plans' feature, I still wanted to figure out what the product needs were. As an already established product, CoursePlan needed to figure out how important this feature was compared to the rest of the features.
I had a discussion with the whole team about this, particularly the product manager and product marketing manager, and it was decided that they wanted to make sure "Multiple Plans" was more of a secondary, sub-feature feature of the product.
Before I started exploring designs, I developed a user flow for the feature, and how it would work with the existing features.
There were two criteria I needed my design to fulfill:
The deciding factor of whether it would fulfill both would be determined through the entry point of the feature. Where the feature lay on the webpage and how it would be accessed by users would relay how important of a feature it ended up becoming.
To explore this, I created three medium-fi prototypes with different entry points, and conducted A/B testing with a set of about 15 users.
We decided to go with dropdown as the entry point for Multiple Plans. For the next steps, I created a medium-fi prototype of the whole feature, which I then used for user testing.
Based on the user testing results, I made changes to the Multiple Plans flow:
After creating the final prototype, I heavily documented my design process and handed it off to the developers. As of fall 2023, the designs are still in the development phase. If you have any questions about my design process and want to know more, please feel free to reach out!
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