Reexamining the major declaration process to make the process more easily navigable and facilitate exploration of major possibilities
After interviewing Dartmouth stakeholders and researching other universities’ solutions, we redesigned DartWorks, Dartmouth College’s platform for major declaration, so that students can easily navigate resources and formal processes to efficiently explore major possibilities.
Point of View Statement: Early career Dartmouth students need to easily navigate resources and formal processes to efficiently explore major possibilities.
For this project, we focused on UX more than UI in order to avoid a jarring transition for upperclassmen that were already used to the old design. Our emphasis was on creating features to address every insight and pain point possible.
We interviewed 11 people including Dartmouth students, students from public & private universities (MIT, Vanderbilt, UT, and Penn State), a Dartmouth professor, Dartmouth alumnus, and a registrar employee. Starting with Dartmouth students from different class years, we isolated pain points in the existing platform.
With the existing platform, the declaring process can be separated into two parts. In the first part, research, many students engage in a back and forth process where they check multiple websites for requirements and correspond with a professor back and forth. Students often have a personal spreadsheet for documentation.
The second part is actually logging courses into the platform. The current platform doesn’t accommodate many edge cases (such as the Quantitative Social Science major) and can be difficult to navigate.
Additionally, the platform itself contained multiple UI/UX frictions.
From these insights, we generated the following how might we questions:
I wanted to see how other institutions addressed these pain points. Two student portals stood out to use in research: MIT and Vanderbilt.
MIT’s platform used a side panel that showed requirements. Furthermore, this side bar showed all courses, including future ones, so that students could add courses to their plan ahead of time. This function solved the issue of users constantly switching between tabs of the ORC, their department website, Dartworks, and their planning document. We took inspiration from this combining of features and added a side panel to our own prototype.
Vanderbilt’s platform has a feature called “What if?” which incorporates all of the current courses the user has taken and shows their progress towards other majors. In this way, students can explore other majors, minors, and modifications ahead of time. This feature would solve the issue students face when they pick up other majors or minors later on in their academic career and struggle to finish in time. We did not add this to our existing prototype and instead intend to add it in our next steps. However, we did use this inspiration to auto populate courses taken into our platform.
Our team generated the following features to address all of these friction points.
To encourage students to explore a variety of major/minor possibilities, we implemented an auto population of courses taken and removed courses irrelevant to majors from being the first to pop up. Seeing as all courses are sorted into buckets by requirement on one side panel and the rest are searchable in the other panel through a “browse additional courses” button, we reduced the amount of time, scrolling and clicks needed with the previous model.
The previous interface was organized by term, showing three at a time. However, many students planned their courses by academic year and needed a display that showed an overall timeline.
The plus button allows two ways to add a course to the plan to make the feature as accessible as possible: one way to add a course is to drag and drop the course into the term slot and the other is to click on the plus button. A dropdown menu will appear and the user can then select which term to add the course to. This removes repetitive UI elements from the previous platform while still providing multiple options to add a course for accessibility.
Not knowing requirements and which classes fulfill which one was a common issue mentioned in user research. This feature removes the extra steps of having to switch back and forth between the department website and the DartWorks platform to check requirements.
This feature saves time for users that are often switching tabs in a back and forth process to find when courses are offered.
When clicking on one of the buckets, “theory and algorithms”, a second side menu pops up with courses that fulfill that requirement. A search bar at the top allows for quicker searching. A drop down arrow allows for a course description, information on previous terms offered (to help plan for the future), and a link to the ORC page for the course. These features consolidate all the information one needs when planning a major into one spot.
We removed horizontal scrolling so that scrolling is consistent throughout the site.
🚨 Oops! 🚨
Missing “Elective Course” requirement
Submit Anyway
Students often miss requirements when declaring a major and have to continually resubmit. This feature allows students to know if they meet requirements immediately. For edge cases, we included a “submit anyway” option.
The current major declaration process requires professors to approve major plans and the burden falls on them to check requirements. With warning signs, we can minimize the time both professors and students need to check requirements and further reduce the back and forth process that exists.
To make this platform a better tool for planning earlier on in academic career, we added a bookmark function to both side bars and the add course area. This allows students to save courses that they want to take in the future without committing to a term to take them. We also added a horizontal progress bar and color coded requirements to show progress. The progress bar indicates based on both courses taken and courses planned. We colored courses that have been taken and fulfill the requirements green and indicated courses planned/in progress with yellow.
Students wasted time finding ORC pages for courses they were interested in taking.
There are two major limitations in this project. One major limitation was that the time frame was 10 weeks. Because of this, most of our user testing was conducted during design critique meetings. If we had more time, I would have liked to do another round of user testing with a variety of Dartmouth students from different class years and levels of technological familiarity. The other limitation was that I had medical difficulties and was unable to work on grayscales. The features that were created during this time were not included in this case study.
Our pitch to Dartmouth’s Information, Technology, and Consulting was well received. We were asked to pitch it again to the team in charge of implementation next term. The employee said that he appreciated the progress bar feature immensely and loved our attention to detail when it came to accessibility features.
The developers on our team coded a prototype using React, Typescript, and MUI Components for the frontend and Node+Express, Typescript, and Render for the backend. For next steps, I hope to incorporate features involving student mentor matching based on similar D-Plans, course recommendations, merge with Layup List (a popular Dartmouth tool for recommending and rating courses), and further incorporating features from Vanderbilt.