Course Selection

The course selection process, which occurs bi-annually at Princeton is oftentimes a very stressful time for students. From making sure they are taking the right classes to fulfill requirements to finding interesting classes, many students rely on three different applications to decide their classes — TigerPath, Princeton Courses, and ReCal.

At A Glance

Team

  • Joanna Kuo '22
  • Begum Ortaoglu '22
  • Ameya Vaidya '24
  • Jacqueline Xu '22
  • Howard Yen '23
  • Cheyenne Zhang '22

Collaborators

  • TigerApps

Tools

  • Figma
  • Miro
  • React

Methods

  • User Interviews
  • User Testing
  • User Surveys
  • Affinity Mapping
  • User Journey Mapping
  • Feasibility vs. Priority Graph
  • User Personas
  • Mindmapping

Timeline

Ongoing

Problem

How might we better facilitate the course selection process?

The Princeton Course Selection process is oftentimes a stressful time for students because they are unsure what classes to take. Currently there are three applications that facilitate this process — TigerPath, Princeton Courses, and ReCal. However, because they are three separate applications the process to select courses is not efficient. As a result, in this project, we aim to combine these products into one to better facilitate the course selection process.

Solution

Resolving pain points across three course selection applications.

As a result, ResInDe teamed up with TigerApps (the club that maintains these applications) to design a new application that not only combines TigerPath, Princeton Courses, and ReCal, but also streamlines the course selection process for all students’ undergraduate career. Our plan was to first conduct extensive user research through surveys and interviews to collect pain points associated with the existing applications and then embark on an iterative design process to create a high-fidelity prototype before diving into the development of the application.

Landing page of Princeton Courses

Research

Students start planning their four years long before looking for courses.

Collection of sticky notes composing a journey map
Collection of sticky notes outlining personas
Collection of sticky notes on an effort-impact matrix
Collection of sticky notes for 'How Might We?' questions
Collection of sticky notes forming an affinity map

We learned students start planning their four years before looking at specific courses. We also learned students trust Student Comments and Professor ratings from students. Students also take many class recommendations from friends and peers.

Ideation

Combining three widely used applications.

Our initial idea was to have all three applications to continue to remain separate. However, after prototyping different versions, we realized it was more user friendly to only have the TigerPath and ReCal application and have Princeton Courses be imbedded into both.

Prototypes

Mapping out the course selection process.

Agenda view of Princeton Courses
Search results and four year view of Princeton Courses

During the prototyping process, we focused on mapping out the course selection process for users. We realized the best way to address this problem was to only have TigerPath and Recal and having Princeton Courses be embedded. To facilitate the relationship between the two, we also added a bookmark feature that will remain consistent in both applications.

Reflection

Not the first step in selecting courses.

From our user research interviews we learned that users start out planning their four years before looking at different specific courses.