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What problem are we solving? (Pain points)
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Difficulty in selecting the right course and professor
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Wasting lots of time switching between different applications like Rate My Prof, UTD grades while selecting courses and professor
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No single platform to provide all the necessary information which is required for selecting best course and best professor.
For whom? (Customers)
o For For incoming & existing students of UTD
When do they experience this issue?
o At At the beginning of each semester, before enrolling to in the course.
What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)
o We have 20 users testing data
o We have the beta version ready, 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 Undergrad Undergrad and Graduate existing student
Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?
o 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.
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How are we solving this issue?
Creating 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 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?
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?
It will be an easily accessible and user-friendly website with reliable data about Course and professor reviews.
Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?
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?
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?
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?
We 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.
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Question 1: Does everyone know what we are launching?
No, 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?
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!
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