IRating Web Design

Inspired by our previous experience, every time when it comes to registering for courses, we need to consult our former students who have taken the class and scout for its relevant information: past syllabus, assignments, etc. We decided to make things easy for students to learn about unattended courses to provide a better academic environment.

iRating is a course review website embedded in the university’s inner system that aids UT students in knowing, choosing, and organizing courses. Our aim is to provide undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. students with neutral, authentic, and authoritative course selection references and a social platform.

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User interview

Comparative Analysis

In comparative analysis stage, we have investigated 3 direct competitors which have simple product and revenue goals as us and 3 indirect competitors which have slightly different products and services, but target the same group of our users with the goal of satisfying the same needs.

Survey Result

Based on our interview and survey result, we summarized those user needs and insights.

Design Process

Affinity Diagram

At the beginning, we went through all the raw data we had collected through interviews, wrote all the work activity data on the sticky notes and began trying to sort out our data in order to categorize them. However, we found it quite difficult. Then we changed our strategy, labeling each note to find their commons, and put closely related ones together as a group. With this bottom-up process, we were able to find systematic and logical patterns behind them, forming Second-level classes like seniors’ advice, official information resources, and other resources. First-level classes like research info time and concerns of course decision. At last, we got our two insights and included that users want to improve efficiency.

Persona

User Journey Map

User Flow

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Paper Prototype

We first started to draw sketches of our own and compare with one another. We started by designing the homepage, and then problems arose as we were drawing the layout of the homepage. When designing our homepage, we consulted various websites for inspiration, including Amazon, Taobao, and Dribble.

We also decided to add pictures onto the words, because it is more visually appealing and leading for users. Even without pictures, pure colors will ease the density of words and reduce the stress for users to process monotonous and massive visual information. We also changed “forum” into “community” to create a sense of solidarity. We spent the most time designing our homepage, including discussing different contents according to user log-in status, contents and positioning of navigation bar. During the discussion, we took cultural differences in positioning navigation bars into consideration - that western design is inclined to sidebars. We referred to websites like Coursera, UT Austin webpage, and Handshake. We also brought the discussion of the course description layout: whether to prioritize rating, and how to arrange Q&A and course reviews.

Storyboards

Medium Fidelity Prototype

During developing our prototype, we referred to our hierarchical task inventory and further refined the table. Based on that, we focused on the main functions of our system:

1. course review and rating system
2. search course module
3. community post module
4. user profile and professor profile module

Although each module contains many minor tasks, to be able to present the tasks which are most relevant to the key functions, we decided to trim our task list according to some key tasks: search course, write a review and rate a course, post in community.

Medium Fidelity Clickthrough

Style Guilde

We conducted three pilot tests of different users, giving them a sequence of tasks, observing their actions, and asking them for feedback after each test. In general, we found that our medium-to-high fidelity prototype sometimes confused users during the testing.  We plan to solve this problem by achieving the high-fidelity prototype in the next step.