Design Rational

Our design decisions were driven by a clear pattern in user research: students rely on a fragmented mix of Reddit, Rate My Professor, and word of mouth. None of which were built for UW students or offered personalized guidance. This led to our core design choice of combining student-sourced reviews with an AI assistant that draws on each user's major, workload, and goals. Our empathy map validated this choice of direction. Students feel anxious and unprepared, already doing research through peers and forums, so our app formalizes that peer knowledge into a structured, trustworthy format that also takes into account factors that students, especially freshmen, tend to overlook.

Usability testing validated our navigation structure. Both testing groups completed all tasks successfully but pointed out repetitive back-button navigation as a friction point, which led us to implement a nav system so users can move between features directly. Every major feature such as peer reviews, difficulty ratings, AI chat, consolidated UW data, maps back to a gap our research identified, making the design a direct response to what students said they needed but couldn't find anywhere else.