Table of Contents:

Problem

Questions to answer:

• What problem are we solving? (Pain points)

  • Difficulty in selecting the right course and professor

  • Wasting lots of time switching between different applications like Rate My Prof, UTD grades while selecting courses and professor

  • No single platform to provide all the necessary information which is required for selecting best course and best professor.

• 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 users testing data

  • 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)

  • Undergrad and Graduate existing student

• 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 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.

Proposal

Questions to answer:

• 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?

  • Students can collect information on professors and courses from UTD Grades and Rate My Prof application

  • 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 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.

Plan

Questions to answer:

• What are we building?

  • A readily accessible, user-friendly, and intuitive website with reliable data about courses and professors' reviews.

• 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.

• How do we know that it works?

  • When we see the accurate results related to the searched entity.

• What are we measuring?

  • Time required to display SEARCH results.

  • Accuracy of results.

  • User engagement time.

• When will it be ready?

  • We will start in August 2023. It will be ready by December 2023.

❌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 launching.

• 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

  • 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