Two-Week Design Project: D-Planner
As the final project in an introductory design thinking course, I collaborated with three teammates to improve the experience of course planning for Dartmouth students.
Interviews
We interviewed 50 stakeholders, including Dartmouth undergraduates of all class years, a faculty member, and an undergraduate from another liberal arts college.
Common Pain Points
Students felt overwhelmed by the number of information sources and the amount of information they needed to juggle.
Web-based sources had incomplete information and were hard to use.
Despite all of the resources in front of them, some students felt alone in the process of course planning.
Bright Spots
A resilient sophomore who had a strong love of learning viewed course selection as an exciting opportunity rather than a threat: “I wish I could do a 12-class term!”
An experienced and organized senior, with strong social networks for getting course selection advice, gestured to the spreadsheet she’d built for course planning, and said: “I’ve perfected this.”
Critical Insights & Point of View Statement
Students experience choice paralysis because of information overload.
The structure of the information required for course selection is spread across many difficult-to-use websites, which makes an already-complex decision-making process even more difficult.
Many students rely on upperclassmen more than course descriptions and online course reviews, because personalized advice is critical.
POV: "Dartmouth students feel overwhelmed by the course election process. They need personalized academic guidance and organized course information in order to develop short-term and long-term course plans that allow them to discover and pursue their passions."
Rapid Ideation
We had fun ideating based on our POV, coming up with absurd ideas and then trying to make them realistic, and grouping ideas that might each solve part of the problem, in order to create a composite solution.
Prototyping & Iteration
We made low-resolution works-like prototypes of some of our favorite ideas and collected feedback from prospective users - for example, we used a simple deck of index cards to demonstrate the experience of quickly skimming through many course offerings, and tagging the ones that sound interesting for a deeper review. After iterating on the top ideas, we created a looks-like prototype below:
We were given the opportunity to present our ideas, design process, and the video above to Dartmouth’s president.
The full written report is available here: D-Planner Final Report
My biggest lesson from this class was that I love human-centered design. I felt empowered to make abstract, difficult, and important problems more approachable. HCD is the framework through which I can productively direct my energy to make the world a better place. After the conclusion of the project, I was ready to move on to other pursuits that I felt would be more meaningful to me than developing course selection software. Fortunately for future Dartmouth students, my groupmate and friend Adam McQuilkin (portfolio link coming soon), decided to take it to the next level by pitching it to our on-campus student-run software design organization. He won the (very competitive) pitch, and thanks to his perseverance, the website is now up in beta.