Data is the name of the game this week. Survey results are in and we were able to finally quantify some of the problems students share when planning their four years here at UCSD. Some of our broader findings revealed a consensus that the majority of people agree that a four year plan helped keep them on track to graduate in four years and that its hard to keep track of classes and requirements. This was nice assurance that students find four year plans as some resource of importance that they both rely on and find problems with as well. Some of our more specific findings include the problems people encounter when planning their time. This included GEs, major requirements, and prerequisites. We learned that people also factor in what classes their friends take to determine what to enroll in. Live feedback from the class(aside from the survey) also was informative because people explained that they also used their friends to determine what classes were fun or easy to take. These are all considerations we want to carry forward into our design.
The awesome Ideo workshop gave us new insight into how to sort out these different considerations when prototyping a design. We learned that a narrower framework might be better when addressing our design; therefore it would be better to make a plan for one or two majors. A GE pool pulled from multiple resources such as capes/ratemyprofessor might be useful as well to inform students about GEs. A class-matching resource could also be useful especially for a freshman that is planning out their classes after orientation. This way people can easily plan to take classes together. All of these are just some of the considerations we are considering after the Ideo workshop. Going forward our goal for this week is to get feedback from our peers and learn about how they format their four year plans and then use that insight to create more concrete prototypes that will further be tested.
