While participating in InternHacks, my team and I designed and developed a website to provide students with course ratings and recommendations from peers who have already taken the class. RateMyClass is a platform to help students choose classes within their university and make the most of their college experience.
Process DeckJune - July 2020
Research, Ideation, UX Design, UI Design, Prototyping
Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Framer
Jack Salisbury, Carlos Mercado, Valentina Lai, Libanose Teffera, Cesar Ayuso
In the summer of 2020, URx launched the inaugural InternHacks program: a 6 week hackathon mentored by professionals at Netflix, eBay, Lyft and more. During this time, I partnered with 5 computer science students to design and develop a product of our choice. With a very open-ended prompt, my team and I set out to find a space in the tech field where we could help make a difference.
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” - Malcolm X
We all found our education to be a common ground to work off of and so began the search for our problem space. A few meetings later, we decided to focus our product on the process of finding and selecting courses, especially to help decide which classes to take. This is something every single university student has to go through multiple times a year, making this project very impactful.
We began this project with a lot of background research to make sure we were fully aware of what exactly we would need to accomplish. We decided that a review-based platform would best serve our purposes and would be feasible to complete in 6 weeks.
As the only designer on the team, I was tasked with researching which review scale and system would suit our platform best.
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Once it was clear that we would go forward with a 5-point scale for our reviews, I began working on a potential user journey on how users might interact with the website. I decided, given our time limit, to focus on the one user journey that was most important to our project.
As great as it would be to automatically gain authentic reviews and users on our platform, that’s not completely realistic. This meant I would need to think through different use cases and scenarios that might come up.
What if there are no reviews?
This scenario is the first to pop up (in my mind at least) because this is most likely a situation we will encounter after launching the website. To tackle this scenario, our approach would be to increase awareness and encourage university friends to write a review or recommend the site to others. Luckily, we are all currently university students and have a direct connection with our intended audience. This will make increasing awareness much easier, and we hope that our efforts will produce some interest in our platform.
Fast forward to a couple months later...
Now we finally have users interacting with our website and writing reviews! But how will we deal with the people who might write fake reviews or spam course pages with irrelevant reviews?
I noticed this occurring on several other review platforms, and I decided to take actions to prevent this activity as much as possible. Therefore, I integrated 2 different approaches to minimize spamming and fake reviews:
1. Users can upvote and downvote reviews they find helpful or unhelpful. This way users can filter through reviews based on which ones are most useful.
2. Encouraging users to make accounts when they write a review. Students will be asked to enter their university email and confirm their email address. By doing this, they are given “verified” checkmarks next to their reviews and account profiles. This way, when someone is reading through reviews, they will know reviews with a verified mark are definitely students at that university, and therefore, are more reliable.
It was my responsibility to bring the brand and visual identity for RateMyClass to life. I made sure to communicate with the team to help me make the visual design decisions.
Here are a few screens that I shared with the rest of the team:
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After discussing our preferences for what we felt best suited our project, I went ahead and developed the full visual design guide. I made sure to include everything down to the last detail to help out the developers as much as possible when they recreated my designs in code.
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After 6 weeks of research, design, and development, we finally arrived at the final solution: a review-based website that provides users with a variety of course reviews and relevant information to make the college experience easier. The screens can be seen in the videos below.
Click through the prototype!
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Users land on the university search page. Once the user selects their university they are taken to the University Home. Here they can browse through top rated courses within the university and filter by college. If filtered by department, the home displays top courses within the department. Based on feedback I had received earlier in the process, I changed the scoring levels and decreased the amount of user clicks needed to land on the course page.
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To write a review users do not need an account, though it is encouraged so users can edit the review later. I designed a simple reviewing page where users can use sliders to decide their ratings and some text to explain their reasons. After researching the pros and cons of sliders and possible different rating methods, I chose to use a 5-point scale and a slider because it matched the amount of information we wanted for each review and was more accurate than a thumbs up or down.
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For users that create an account, they receive course recommendations based on courses they’ve saved on their account dashboard. This dashboard is home to all the user’s saved courses and written reviews. This way users get a more personalized experience. Users who create an account and verify their student email also get a verified check next to all their reviews, which are anonymous. This way students looking through reviews can be sure the student who posted the review goes to that school.
Research early on because it will make design decisions easier. Users come first and then design. Cater your design for everyone on your team as well.
Make sure you check out the full process for RateMyClass here! 😊