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.

  • Competitive Analysis

    See where you shine, where you don’t, and how to leverage that intel to fill the most important gaps in your experience.

  • Taxonomy Research

    Avoid internal bias with quantitative research methods that let users create the most intuitive navigation groupings for their needs.

  • Sketches

    When it comes to bringing ideas to life, the pencil is mightier than the keyboard. And much faster.

  • Prototypes

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Bringing the user experience to life with a fully-interactive artifact is a low-cost, high-value way to iterate without the investment of code.

  • Thumbnail Flows

    To create in-depth, omni-channel experiences it’s best to start small. Show the full picture — opportunities, gaps, and all — to problem-solve the right solution.

  • Responsive Design

    We design for the future on today’s devices. Every element is considered for every size display to create an ideal experience for all users.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • User Testing

    To get decisive, actionable findings, we let users explore without artificial restrictions. We design our prototypes to accommodate this need, as a final product would.

  • Functional Specifications

    Converting your designs into well-documented specifications with functionality, flows, layout, and styles ensures that no developer has to guess what comes next.

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.

Making complex decisions—like how far off a student is from their requirements and what's left—easy to parse through information visualizations
Making complex decisions—like how far off a student is from their requirements and what's left—easy to parse through information visualizations

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.

Once a circuitous, confusing spider web of decisions, registration was transformed into a focused wizard guiding students along the way
Once a circuitous, confusing spider web of decisions, registration was transformed into a focused wizard guiding students along the way

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.

Christine Celli, AVP of Digital Experience, Northeastern University