DartPath
How might we make course planning at Dartmouth
simple
My Role
Designer and Developer
Worked with 3 other first-years
Timeline
20 weeks
Jan-May 2024
Tools
Figma
React Native
Firebase
This project was created through a collaboration between the Women in Science Project and the DALI Lab. The team consisted of 4 first-year women under the mentorship of a DALI Lab designer and developer. We were given 20 weeks to design and develop our own idea from scratch.
THE DESIGN
The Home Page
The home page allows users to visualize different four-year plans easily and experiment with different majors, courses, and D-plans using drag and drop and customized color coding. Additional features such as the distributive pie and major progress bar help reduce the number of websites students have to reference during course election periods.
Term Builder
The term builder allows students to make "draft terms" — a habit I noticed during user interviews
Off Term Toggle
A toggle allows students to easily change an on term to an off term, allowing flexible exploration of d-plans. Further, the note feature lets students comment on their off term plans
The Main Feed
The main feed targets the need for students to feel more guided in their course planning process, while making course planning more social and fun. This feature allows users to use other students' D-plans as inspiration for course combinations. Students can also use this to align off terms or classes with friends.
Main feed scrolling
Easily accessible filter
The Friend Page
The Friend Page allows users to build a community to support their course planning process. Students can connect with friends or follow people with similar academic paths for guidance, advice, and support.
PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS
I tackled ambiguity with collaboration, curiosity, and adaptability
Hover to read more
Collaboration
Curiosity
Adaptability
I used visual tools to help synthesize my research
We conducted 13 user interviews and synthesized our findings using personas, empathy maps, and POV statements.
Key Findings
Students need information from at least 4 websites when course planning
Students value course recommendations from other students over layup list and dean recommendations
Students find course planning stressful
I learned how to break down large tasks
Narrowed our feature scope via a feature prioritization matrix
Broke our brainstorming sessions into Crazy 8s
Broke course planning into 4 main pain points
REFLECTING
What I learned
This project was my first full design project. Under the mentorship of Maria Cristoforo and Sam Blais, and alongside my fellow WISPees, I learned how to turn an idea into a solution during a 10-week design process.
Technical Skills
I learned how to conduct and analyze user interviews, and use this data to create informed grayscales, hi-fis, and prototypes in Figma.
Succeeding Under Mentorship
In this mentorship experience I strived to always ask questions, clarify concepts, and ask for advice. This helped me quickly get the hang of Figma, Firebase, and React.
Learning from my Teammates
Throughout this project I valued the diverse perspectives of my teammates to come up with more idea and make brainstorming more fun!
Next Steps
If I had more time with this project these are the areas I would work on…
Fleshing out the social aspect of DartPath. During the design process we played with the idea of having comments and messages, but ultimately had to cut those features due to the tight timeline.
Checking pre-reqs. A major need we discovered during user interviews was that students found finding the pre-reqs for classes frustrating as they are listed separate from the time table. A feature we did not have time to incorporate was a checking feature that could ensure that a student had completed the required pre-reqs for a class based on the position within the D-plan it was placed.
Thanks for reading :)
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