Final Project (Summary)

“GITA” – Graduate-In-Time-Application, is the proposed prototype for my team’s final project entry. It’s a system that enables students to do upfront planning of their roadmap of the modules that they want to take throughout their life in school, so that they will be able to graduate on time.

As such, this system is most appropriate to be linked to the school’s database so that the retrieval of all the modules information will be the most updated. The targeted users are definitely the students, but the school administrators are also part of the users. This is true as they will be able to forecast or foresee the “popularity” of a particular module in a semester, so that all the hassle of approving appeals of modules will be minimized.

We believed that this all-in-one application for students and administrative staffs will be essential in helping them to handle everything that is related to students’ path to graduation.

The key element of this application is the module planner, or roadmap, to aid students to plan their modules preferences, in order to graduate in time with the least administrative hassles. Moreover, this application will encourage students to plan out their modules upfront, so as to avoid frantic bidding during bidding periods if there are any last minute changes, which will in turn result in desperate appeals to faculty administrations. Goal setting of CAP scores for each semester will enable to system to estimate the grades for each module in order to meet their targeted goal.

Administrative staffs will also benefit from it. There will be better communication between students and them, and there will be reduction in repetitive and mundane requests pertaining to graduation and the necessary requirements. The staff will then be able to have a better awareness of the modules’ demands by students, and so able to make all the necessary arrangements to avoid unexpected circumstances.

The details of the “User requirements” are as such. First, to keep track of each student’s graduation requirements, the modules taken and the grades attained for each, easy access of each module’s information (i.e. workload, schedule), the pre-requisites requirements of certain modules and modules preclusion. It will be an effective and interactive application that allows the students to plan and save their personalized roadmap. This in turn will inform administration about the bidding intent for that particular semester.

“Functional Requirements” include verification of student’s ability to graduate on time; link with the school’s database will enable the students to know their progress at each stage/semester and the ability to store each student’s roadmaps for easy retrieval through the school’s network or database. The administrative staffs will also be able to gather and tabulate data/information based on students’ roadmaps for administrative purposes.

Next, we are expected to develop a low-fidelity prototype of our application and then to do “Heuristic & User Evaluations” on it. This is to enable the users and the experts in this area to do some quantitative testing on the system, so as to get some crucial and important feedback before developing the high-fidelity one.

To end with, I personally feel that I have learnt a lot through from developing this high-fidelity product/application. Besides learning all the concepts for constructing a product based on user experience as the core functionality, time management and developing low-fidelity prototype, etc, are also new and interesting concepts that I have taken with me from this module.