⟡ Background

What is CourseGrab?

Enrolling in classes at Cornell can be a stressful experience, from making sure you set your alarm when pre-enroll starts to creating multiple backup schedules in case classes fill up to hoping your internet connection cooperates.

CourseGrab is a free mobile app that enhances the student enrollment experience for over 3,000 Cornell students each semester by notifying students as soon as a spot opens up. The app allows students to track an unlimited number of classes, view how many other students are tracking a section, and navigate directly to Student Center once a course is available.

⟡ The Problem

When is pre-enroll?!

Due to the time-sensitive nature of course enrollment, knowing when the pre-enroll and add-drop periods begin for their class year is critical for students to get into their desired classes.

⟡ The process

User Research

In Fall 2021, CourseGrab was in the early stages of implementing push notifications for pre-enroll. I worked with the product manager to define the research goals.

Methods

I conducted eight in-person user interviews with current CourseGrab users. We decided to use user interviews since we wanted to gain qualitative data on user behavior and preferences, and being in-person allowed for us to observe how users actually interact with the app.

We recruited students who were currently taking courses taught by Cornell AppDev since these users tended to be first-years or sophomores who would benefit the most from CourseGrab. Course enrollment is based on seniority, with seniors enrolling in classes first and first-years enrolling last, so underclassmen tend to struggle to get into popular classes.

The interviews lasted around 20 minutes and occurred in a quiet classroom in the evening. A notetaker was present at each interview. A sample of the interview protocol is shown above.

Findings

The 2 key findings from our research that informed the design direction for pre-enrollment notifications were:

1. Users don't seek out information on pre-enrollment dates. Almost all users learned about pre-enroll times via emails from Cornell and within their social circles.
2. Users only want to be notified of what is relevant to them. Users generally only open notifications that are time-sensitive and relevant to them; they tend to ignore or turn off notifications if there are too many.

From our research, we were able to identify key insights about user’s behaviors and preferences in using CourseGrab. In addition, the pain points identified were used by developers to improve the usability of CourseGrab; for instance, insight #6 provided support for developers to make the cards on the home page tappable.

⟡ The Solution

Personalized Notifications

The pre-enrollment notifications feature took into consideration the user research findings, as we decided to go for personalized push notifications based on class year. Below is the final prototype for users to input their class year.

After inputting their class year, students would receive a notification on the day pre-enroll begins.

⟡ Reflection

What I learned

I learned how to work with a cross-functional team and communicate user research findings to inform design decisions. I also developed my communication design skills through this project. If I had more time, I would have wanted to conduct more user interviews and evaluate my solution through user testing.