3-09-2024 Search Bar Determining Meeting notes

• One dashboard with a 1/3 - 2/3 split

  • left hand (1/3) side is for professor detail cards and course detail cards (representing aggregate data about either of those broader groups which will appear when you are filtering for one of those things)

  • right hand (2/3) side is for course-professor combo cards (aggregates data about a course taught by a specific professor)

• Search bar function

  • Based around creating filters by suggesting them when you type something

    • Example: typing “John” would suggest “John Cole” as a professor filter

    • Example: typing “Introduction to” would suggest “Introduction to Machine Learning” as a course name filter

  • Filters to make (can add more later)

    • Professor name

    • Course name

    • Course number

    • Semester (before, during, after)

      • This would remove semesters that don’t fall within the defined range from the aggregations represented in all the different cards

      • Example: adding the filter “after: Fall 2022” would remove all data from semesters Spring 2022 and before from the aggregates determined with the other filters

        • if course-professor combo cards only include data from outside the time filters, then it would removed

    • QUESTION TO BE RESOLVED: how much do we filter the filters one can add? For example, if the user has some filters already, such as “CS 1200”, do we, or how do we, limit the filters they can add for professors? Do we want to limit this to just the professors for that course/other filters already applied? How do we indicate if certain filters are mutually exclusive?

  • QUESTION TO BE RESOLVED: how can we show off the filters that are available? Drawing on the design of e-commerce sites like BestBuy, there is often all the filter options off to the left-hand side which can quickly be applied. This may allow us to provide users with faster filter adding and room to grow how many filters we want (such as a minimum score on some metric, like RMP difficulty rating), but we don’t want to split functionality between the search bar and filter area too much. Potentially, the search bar would just be used once as a broad search before going in more detail with this side-bar area.

  • Clear all option

Examples

• Searching just for a professor (John Cole)

  • left hand side has professor detail card for that prof (John Cole)

  • right hand side has course-professor combo cards for all the courses John Cole has taught

• Searching just for a course (CS 2337)

  • left hand side has professor detail cards for all the profs who teach the course

  • right hand side has course-professor combo cards for all the professors who teach that course

    • QUESTION TO BE RESOLVED: How to show course specific/aggregated details? do we have course-professor combo card just for the course and differentiate it somehow? do we have a course detail card over on the left, but if so how to show off all the data (such as grade distribution)?

• Searching for both course and professor (John Cole CS 2337)

  • left hand side has professor detail card for John Cole

  • right hand side has one course-professor combo card for the search query (John Cole 2337)