Winners of the UXSC 2015 Designathon design an innovative master planner for college students

On April 25th, 2015, UXSC (the student UX design group at the University of Southern California) staged a Designathon, a shorter version of hackathon tailored to user experience design. The Designathon, held at USC’s tech incubator facility The Blackstone Launchpad, was open not only to students but to anyone who wanted to participate. Teams were formed the morning of the event, and each team was mentored by UX design professionals who helped them with the design process.

The winning team of Nikita Dhesikan, Kenia Duque, Lowrie Fu, and Alison Omon (and mentored by UX designer Sarah Dzida) were charged with designing Koreplan: a master planner for college students. Kenya Duque explained how their design would address student’s needs:

“Koreplan would help users find an optimal work/school schedule based off of their lifestyle. Instead of trying to re-design Google Calendars or another popular calendar platform, we decided to concentrate on designing a better experience for USC students when they use Web-Reg to sign up for classes.”

Common frustrations that students face with current online tools include having to open multiple tabs to see what courses to take in one semester (OASIS, Ratemyprofessor, Google Calendar, etc.), the overhead in remembering the specific classes that are needed, and being forced to start over when there is an enrollment error, such as not meeting the prerequisites for a class. These frustrations require students to spend many hours of time at tasks that should be much simpler, and the causes of these frustrations may also lead to students making errors in their course selection and academic planning, negatively impacting their overall university experience.

The team’s solution was to have a student log into Koreplan where their dashboard would show their remaining classes and the progress they have made to their 4 year plan. The student clicks on a few classes from their Major, Minor, or GE course lists, and Koreplan makes a few schedules with the combination of classes. The class sections have a table of details where a student can see if any of their Facebook friends are also enrolled in the class, and the rating of the professor teaching the course. Once a student has chosen their desired school schedule, they can integrate it with their personal calendars such as Google Calendar, iCal, etc.

The team focused on three primary user personas, representing a freshman student, a junior student and a senior. Although they did not develop a persona for a sophomore, the personas they did have allowed them to analyze the problems from the point of view of students from the very beginning to the end of their university experiences. The personas also represented a college athlete, a med student, and a member of a fraternity, giving the designers a broad range of user perspectives.

The confusions and frustrations with course enrollment selection and management, and the current lack of a systems-based approach to managing one’s academic career, were clear and universal for students of all types. While there are lots of great digital tools available for students, the lack of a coherent ecosystem for making these tools work together is exactly the problem the team approached. The solution they came up with, Koreplan, is precisely the digital trend that is defining UX design now and will continue to do so over the next five years: not just innovation in a single product, but designing innovative synergies between products. In this way, the Koreplan team not only designed a product that would solve major pain points for their target users, but also leveraged the synergies between existing technologies in a way that was inventive and forward-thinking.

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Below are images from the work that Nikita Dhesikan, Kenia Duque, Lowrie Fu, and Alison Omon did for the Designathon:

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