...
What problem are we solving? (Pain points)
o Difficulty in choosing courses and professors.
o Classes are always full. No way to know if a new class was added.
o Difficult to get Prof. reviews in one place.
o Difficult to get course reviews in one place.
o Easy way to obtain previous students’ opinions.
o Difficulty in selecting the right course and professor
o Wasting lots of time switching between different applications like Rate My Prof, UTD grades while selecting courses and professor
o No single platform to provide all the necessary information which is required for selecting best course and best professor.
For whom? (Customers)
o For o For incoming & existing students of UTD
When do they experience this issue?
o During their course plan or at the semester beginningo At the beginning of each semester before enrolling to the course.
What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)
o o We have collected user surveyso 20 users testing data
o We have product’s the beta version ready
o We have user testing data.
, and 20 feedbacks for the beta version
Which customers are we working with, or hearing from, to better understand this problem? (User Testing, Focus Groups)
o We are working with all types of students at UTD. So far we collected about 20 user testing data.o Undergrad and Graduate existing student
Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?
o This helps reduce the time spent by students going through multiple websites like UTD Trends and Rate My Profo There is no single platform that offers all the primary information required for course selection in a single place.
o Need something which saves students’ time as they waste it by switching between apps, contacting previous students, and taking demo classes.
💭 Proposal
Questions to answer:
How are we solving this issue?
o We plan to offer students the ability to view previous data about courses & professors in an organized manner and let them rate & reviewCreating an intuitive website that provides relevant details about courses and available professors, eventually saves students time and helps them in making decisions about the right courses and professors.
What alternatives did we consider?
o Alternative would be asking each professor individually, taking trial classes of those professors or creating an excel database
o Contacting Academic Advisor
o Students can collect information on professors and courses from UTD Grades and Rate My Prof application
o Contacting Academic Advisor
o Contacting other students.
o Research according to own’s interest
Why did we land with this?
o It is much more accessible, scalable & intuitive.To provide a readily accessible, easy to use and intuitive platform that provide detail about course reviews and professor reviews
What is the general shape of this solution?
o The solution is designed to be It will be an easily accessible and user-friendly , with a simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy for students to search and find the information they need.o It contains reliable data to make decisions about the course or prof. selection.website with reliable data about Course and professor reviews.
Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?
o We currently have a prototype. For comparison, there are UTD Grades and Yes, Rate My Prof and UTD Grades are the potential comparisons already available in the market.
How will we know that we’ve solved this issue?
o We will know when the course plan time has been reduced, and students’ academic performance has improved If students can make enrollment decisions fast, approximately within one day (currently, from the user testing data – they take a minimum of 3 days).
Students only use UTD trends and course curriculum to make enrollment decisions.
What will we measure?
o We will use data from user feedback, reviews, and ratings and ask specific questions regarding the satisfaction level and time taken.Reduction in time required to decide on courses and professors for the semester.
Improvement in Academic performances for students who took enrollment decisions using UTD trends. (Collect this information using a survey)
Have we considered how we’re building this to be fast, performant, scalable, and/or relatively low-cost on our services?
o The Product & Services will be offered free of cost.
o We will be doing testing to identify issues & make the product fast & performant.
o The Product will be made scalable as it will use API based calls and the APIs will be documentedWe are using reliable course data from UTD.
We will use a reliable cloud server to host our website and a secure database to store the information.
We will use the flexible web stack for the development of the website and hence make it vertically scalable.
We will be using a monitoring tool (potentially an inbuilt tool from AWS/Heroku or any cloud provider) to monitor the average load on the website and its scalability.
In the future, we will use a load balancer to make it more fault tolerant.
🛫 Plan
Questions to answer:
What are we building?
o We are building a website that solves the mentioned issue for studentsA readily accessible, user-friendly, and intuitive website with reliable data about courses and professors' reviews.
How does it work?
o It uses databases stored in the server, an intuitive front-end UI that provides the search interface and related data for comparisonWhile interacting with user-friendly UI, when the user search for a course/a professor, it will list all the related results. Results are formed from reliable data stored in a secured database.
How do we know that it works?
o We know that it works if a user is seamlessly able to decide on which courses to enrolWhen we see the accurate results related to the searched entity.
What are we measuring?
o We are measuring the user’s engagement with the website and what are the elements user is interacting withTime required to display SEARCH results.
Accuracy of results.
User engagement time.
When will it be ready?
o We will start in August 2023. It will be ready by December 2023.
...
Question 1: Does everyone know what we are launching?
o Few of the customers know that will be a better version of rate my professor/UTD GradesNo, we have to market it before launching.
Question 2: Are we sure this is going to work?
o Yes. We have seen a lot of demand for such a product through user survey stats
Question 3: What are our launch steps?
o Launch 1: Design overhaul with all basic features.
o Launch 2: Possibilities of integration with Planner.Ideate and design features
Development
Testing
Going Live (with new features) + Marketing
Maintaining and Improving (again step1 and so on repeat)
🚀 It’s go time!
… and feel free to link to other more detailed documents