CS 147 10/21/04

Revised Project Proposal

Group: Axess Revamp

Members: Kenneth Lee, Vishakha Parvate, Karenina Susilo

Introduction

Stanford University offers a flexible environment for students to identify their core interests and pursue a program of study that best suits what they want to do. While this atmosphere fosters creative programs at the same time it can lead to a fair amount of confusion about what courses a student needs to enroll to fulfill requirements both for her major as well as those set down by the university guidelines.

Our modifications to Axess hope to make the college experience more pleasurable and the registration for classes easier and more intutive.

Problem

The main problem we want to address is there isn’t a comprehensive system that provides students with all class information they need to decide what classes to register for. The current setup requires students to consult multiple documents (bulletin, time schedule and Axess) to construct a study list and maintain their class schedule. Registration for a class requires a student to know the class number (e.g. CS147 class number is 3600). This information is not obvious and definitely not as widely known as the class code (e.g. CS147).

From our contextual inquiry, we also learned that many students prefer low-tech sources such as the time schedule and self-made charts and spreadsheets to manage their class schedule and study list.

Our redesign aims to eliminate these problems and provide a more intuitive way for students to make the process more transparent. Our solution will follow the conceptual model we believe students have in managing their classes, based on our contextual inquiry.

Functionality of our Redesign

Currently Axess already has a working structure that has the information students need. However, the information is structured in a way that is difficult for students to use and understand.

Following is our recommendations of features that will meet the goal of improving Axess to follow students’ conceptual model in managing their classes:

·  Maintain and refine a list of academic goals and interests (i.e. view list of suggested courses of your major)

·  Manage study lists - add, drop and edit classes

·  Enable class searching by terms that are more familiar to students (i.e. by class code rather than the relatively unheard and unfamiliar class number)

·  A feature to map out long-term course plans (at least 1-year course plan)

·  Enable a suspension of registration rules during the shopping period

·  Enable a wish list of classes for students for those classes that are intriguing but does not fit well into their schedule or are offered in different quarter.

Experiment

Our experiment hopes to test that the improved system we provide will ease the task of registering for classes and compiling a comprehensive study list. A key point for us is to ensure that confusion about how to most efficiently use Axess is kept a minimum. This is a tentative design for the experiment and we will modify it based on our prototype and new issues that we may identify during the course of development.

Subjects:

4 Stanford students comprising 2 freshmen and 2 upperclassmen. They will be given role-playing scenarios and asked to perform a short list of tasks

Tasks:

·  Register for a predetermined set of classes (Easy)

·  Search for classes based on faculty name, student interest and the timing of classes (Medium)

·  Register for classes needed to fulfill requirements for their major (Hard)

Independent Variable:

Half the subjects will interact with the old version of Axess and half of them with our redesign.

Dependant Variables:

The time taken to complete the task and the level of simplicity achieved over the earlier interface. We will develop a five-point scale of satisfaction and ask the subjects to rate the ease of completing various tasks.

Expected Results:

We expect to eliminate the need for consulting multiple documents. This will mean a more streamlined system for registering for classes. We also expect to improve the students’ ability to find the resources they actually want to use.