...
What problem are we solving? (Pain points)
Creating a planner for an entire course with every semester details separately
Easy to track the course completed and to plan for upcoming semester.
Can create your own custom plan or use the template provided by the system.
For whom? (Customers)
For incoming & existing students of UTD
When do they experience this issue?
At the beginning of each semester, before enrolling in the course.
What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)
We have 20 145
users testing data We have the beta version ready, and 20 feedbacks for the beta versionbased on the survey conducted in March’23.
Which customers are we working with, or hearing from, to better understand this problem? (User Testing, Focus Groups)
Undergrad and Graduate existing studentCurrently focusing on undergrad student.
Most probably will extend our product to graduate as well PHD students.
Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?
There is no single platform that offers all the primary information required for course selection or plan all the semester in a single place.
Need something which saves students’ time as they waste it by switching between apps, contacting previous students, and taking demo classes.
...
How are we solving this issue?
Creating an intuitive website that provides the list of courses based on the degree plan, eventually saves students time and helps them in making decisions about the right plan for their semester.
What alternatives did we consider?
Students can go to galaxy portal and check for the schedule planner for the course availability as well as go to coursebook to check for professors availability and syllabusavailability of professors and the courses.
Contacting Academic Advisor
Contacting other students.
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 all the degree plans with its courses ready to drag and drop the classes for the semester, export the plan and get ready for the semester
What is the general shape of this solution?
It will be an easily accessible and user-friendly website with reliable data about the degree plan with credit hours and total courses needed to complete the degree based on relevant plan
Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?
Yes, Galaxy/coursebook
How will we know that we’ve solved this issue?
If students can make enrollment decisions fast, approximately within one day 2 hrs (currently, from the user testing data – they take a minimum of 3 days). ??????????????1 hr to a maximum of more than 6 hrs).
Students only use UTD trends and course curriculum Nebula Planner and Coursebook to make enrollment decisions. ?????????/
What will we measure?
Reduction in time required to plan the degree as well as your the semester.
Improvement in Academic performances for students who took enrollment decisions using Nebula planner. (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.
We will try to use analytics tool to monitor the page search and amount of time used on different search and buttons.
🛫 Plan
Questions to answer:
What are we building?
A readily accessible, user-friendly, and intuitive website with reliable data about courses and professors' reviewswhich can help plan the semester as well as entire course with ease.
How does it work?
While 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.clicks on the template (new/custom), it will navigate to a new page and then we can use drag and drop functionality to plan the classes required for current semester as well as the upcoming ones.
How do we know that it works?
When we see the accurate results related to the searched entityas well as the number of students opting for Nebula planner suing analytics tool.
What are we measuring?
Time required to display SEARCH resultstaken to plan a degree/semester.
Accuracy of results.
User engagement time.
When will it be ready?
We will start in August 2023. It will be ready by December 2023.The product is already launched.
❌What are we not building? (Out of Scope)
Not recommending courses to students based on their major.???????
Not suggesting any alternative courses if a course is full.????????
Then, answer these questions:
Question 1: Does everyone know what we are launching?
No, we have to market it before launchingto strategize promotion our products to stduents.
Question 2: Are we sure this is going to work?
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 - done
Inittial Development - done
Testing - done
Going Live (with new/initial features) +
Marketing - still needed
Maintaining and Improving (again step1 and so on repeat)