NU Graduate Registration
Making grad school registration a lot less burdensome
Scheduling is easy—once you pull all the curriculum information out of unstructured PDFs.
The Challenge
Finding the ideal graduate school can be tough. Once you’re there, getting the classes you need should be easy. When it came to navigating Northeastern’s antiquated class registrations system, the experience was anything but simple. Especially when the information you need lives as unstructured data in PDFs buried in multiple sites, and then you have to register in a different one.
Our Approach
After gaining a deep understanding of the school’s desires and the students’ needs, we pulled it all together into an easy-to-use, single-page interface that put the power in the student’s hands and gave them a coherent view of their curriculum.
We started off with a simple UX idea: build the experience around the most basic questions students ask when registering for classes. What have I taken so far? What’s next for me? What are the prerequisites I need? And what does my schedule look like?
Then, we asked deeper questions: Where did my transfer credits go? How do I substitute a class? Is my student Visa in good standing? When exactly do I graduate?
This new, single-page application relied on a series of microinteractions to be successful. By creating a full-featured prototype, we were able to present our ideas clearly, test with users through their natural flows, and make critical refinements before entering development.
The Results
Giving students new clarity and control over their classes is making them more successful in their studies. The grad students we tested with said it best.
“It feels very consumer-forward. Much easier and more well thought out than a lot of checkout experiences I’ve had.”
“It’s very clear so I can tell what courses I have finished and what I have not, easy to track.”
“I am thrilled that this feature is available for NU students, and I’m sure advisors throughout share the same sentiment.”
We partnered with ZeroDegrees on an ambitious project
…to reimagine the graduate registration experience. In less than two months, the ZD team transformed our requirements into a high-fidelity, testable prototype. That paved the way for a tight ZD and NU development collaboration that we’re able to refine and improve incrementally based on the needs of our students and their academic advisors.