Davis Cattlelog
Simplifying course registration for students at UC Davis.
OVERVIEW
Cattlelog serves as a centralized resource hub for UC Davis students, offering reliable course information and class recommendations based on desired degree requirements. Course instruction quality, appeal of curriculum, course difficulty, course workload, and other relevant metrics are provided by Cattlelog through student-written reviews and ratings.
THE PROBLEM
UC Davis students lack proper resources regarding instruction and course quality, with word-of-mouth being the main source of acquiring knowledge. Outside of Rate My Professor and Reddit, students at UC Davis do not have access to crowdsourced, qualitative information that is useful for schedule building, and may miss out on discovering relevant or interesting courses that help work toward their degree. A more intuitive and data-driven approach can significantly improve the decision-making process for students.
APPROACH
USER RESEARCH
My team began with gathering insight from students to identify the goals and preferred site features of users when utilizing web services for course registration support. Responses generated from our survey revealed that students valued the ability to compare courses and professors through qualitative data such as written reviews, but sought additional quantitative data in the form of grade distributions.
Students also found difficulty navigating more established review sites like Rate My Professor due to the website's cluttered interface and unreliable postings.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
MID-FIDELITY
I drafted mid-fidelity wireframes of each page with the goal of keeping cognitive overload to a minimum while displaying all features necessary for course searching. With this in mind, I decided to implement a fixed filter bar to make the main search page more scannable. This allowed users to see the immediate refining of courses while selecting specific course requirements.
HI-FIDELITY
My hi-fi designs were driven by my goal to help students efficiently refine their searching and save time by narrowing down search results to the courses and professors best suited to their needs. The addition of components such as tags to identify professors teaching in the next quarter, graphics to display overall ratings and difficulty rating, interactive buttons, as well as the intentional placement of color all work together to deliver relevant academic information to students, allowing them to make better-informed decisions about their prospective schedules.
Products that deal with content such as academic information tend to be text-heavy, so I focused on cleaning up my desktop designs to reduce visual overload before transitioning to a mobile interface. I rearranged the compositions of each page in my mobile designs by splitting the main page into three distinct collapsible units, which provides users with more intentional flows to follow.
Because the UC Davis' colors are a shade of blue and gold, I decided to use a similar color palette to create the impression that Cattlelog is meant to be used as a university resource.
MARKETING
GRAPHICS AND FLYERS
The week before our marketing push, I designed flyers that would be used to promote our product, concentrating on enhancing our branding and graphics. Because our product's logo is a cow wearing a top hat and monocle, I decided to incorporate the chain of that monocle in my poster designs, using it as a playful graphic element to "lasso" the contents of the flyers together.
MARKETING INITIATIVES
For our first marketing strategy, my team and I took to tabling in high traffic areas of our university's campus, handing out flyers and pitching our product to students and university staff who stopped by to listen.
IMPACT
ANALYTICS
One week after launch we achieved:
500+
unique site users
2000+
page views
One month after launch we achieved:
3000+
unique site users
15,000+
page views
Six months after launch we achieved:
10,000+
unique site users
250,000+
page views