Scenario
John is a computer science major at MIT. He goes to mancourses.mit.edu to choose his classes for the upcoming fall semester. The website automatically logs him in based off of his MIT Certificate. The last time he logged in, he had inputted the classes that he has taken already. Now, he can view the classes he still needs to take in order to complete his major and the General Institute Requirements. He notices that two of his required classes are only offered in the fall, so he preregisters for them since he has the prerequisites required to take each course. He chooses three other classes to complete his schedule based off of the course evaluations, and then finalizes his semester schedule. John uses Google Calendar frequently, so he selects the option to sync to Google Calendar so that he can view his course schedule along with all of his other events.
Now that he has chosen his schedule for the upcoming semester, he decides to plan ahead by seeing which classes he still needs to take in order to graduate. From this list displayed on ManCourses, he can see dependencies of certain classes on other classes. Using this information, John creates a tentative schedule for each remaining semester that he has at MIT. Now that he knows that he can graduate without taking more than 4 classes per semester, he decides to crack open an intoxicating can of “root” beer and relax for the rest of the day.
Designs
Design 1
Design 2
Design 3
<image: design 3 (to be scanned)>
Design 3 sacrifices learnability for efficiency and visibility. The interface is slightly more complicated to learn than our previous designs, but one nice part about it is that most important information is visible all the time (few different screens of information). The current schedule, choices of classes under a specific requirement, and course requirements and dependencies are all visible at any given time. Because of this, it is very quick and easy to access and view important information. In terms of error prevention, the only user errors possible with the system would be registering for two different classes which meet at the same time. This is taken care of by the user interface because the courses which conflict with the currently selected courses would be grayed out (and thus could not be selected).