IS4300 Project Proposal
Project: NEU Course Scheduler
Mostafa Al Khonaizi
Johnny Li
Michael Ng
- Problem
The myNEU course scheduler can be a massive chore to use. It displays all the information for class registration through text. As a result, users finds it difficult to visualize their schedules and identify potential time conflicts. Users will need to open different windows to look for CRN course numbers. They also need to keep track of which courses they are enrolled in to avoid time conflicts. Also, if the user mistakenly add course that overlaps with a registered class, the system only notifies the user of scheduling conflict with no further information about the conflict. The user by themselves would have to further investigate the issue to resolve the conflict. Overall, the course scheduler relies too much on the user’s memory and does not promote efficiency.
- Target Users
The vast majority of users would be Northeastern students that are in the process of preparing or setting their class schedule. These students might use the course scheduler prior to registration to look for appropriate classes and designing their next semester schedule, or they may be attempting to input their classes as soon as they are allowed by their time ticket. As a result, some of them may be in a rush, quickly adding their courses. Current users believe that the current system is stressful and confusing to use.
Some faculty members (e.g. advisors) might also use the course scheduler to help students pick their classes as well as making their own schedules.
- Solution
In our project, we will redesign the course scheduler to be more graphic and visually effective. It will show the user a clear indication of what their potential schedule could look like by a calendar-like appearance. We believe a utility with a calendar-like appearance would be immensely helpful if it is automatically updated with the user's class inputs. It will mainly help users in their two main tasks when interacting with the course system: looking up and registration of classes.
While looking up classes, the user weekly calendar pops up to visually show the representation of the selected course as time slots while notifying the user if there is a conflict with an already registered class.
During class registration, our proposed design will represent all registered classes by showing blocks in their respective time slots in the user’s weekly calendar. Addingweek view can save users significant amount of time figuring out whether the course fit into current schedule or not.