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CoursePlan, Blank Course Cards
A new way for Cornell students to add transfer, study abroad, or other credits to their graduation requirement trackers.
Conducted in-depth user research and designed the end-to-end flow of adding blank course cards two ways to student's graduation requirement trackers.
Overview
CoursePlan, a Cornell Digital Tech & Innovation project, allows Cornell's 10,000+ students to track their graduation requirements. Transfer and study abroad students previously were unable to add these credits as they weren't in the roster.
Impact
I designed a Blank Course Card feature allowing transfer and study abroad students to add their credits to their graduation trackers and keep everything on track. This feature is fully shipped and being used today, increasing CoursePlan's user base.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
Sept 2024 - Nov 2025
Team
1 designer, 2 engineers, 1 PM
A large user group
is being left out
Planning classes can be stressful & overwhelming, but the CoursePlan makes the process clearer. It has college, major, minor requirements and course information built into the app so that you can see and track all your requirements all in one place.
But CoursePlan gets its data from the Cornell class roster, which doesn't account for transfer or study abroad credits.
20%
‍Of Cornell students are transfers
This means 1/5 of the student body is being accounted for by CoursePlan and still struggles to properly keep track of their graduation requirements
14%
‍Of Cornell students study abroad
For these students that may have been tracking their requirements normally prior to studying abroad, their trackers get messed up afterwards
Interviewing 7 transfer & study
abroad students reveals several pain points and insights
During my interviews, I asked questions about...
‍
(1) How these students go about using CoursePlan to try and get around the issues
‍
(2) The transfer and study abroad credit transfer process
‍
(3) How important they feel it is to include these credits in their graduation requirement tracker
01

Users are frustrated with working around it
To get around it, users end up trying to add equivalent classes, or random classes that add up to the same credits, but it ends up messing with their distribution requirements leaving them frustrated.
02

Users are turning to other methods of tracking
‍Some users expressed turning to other methods of tracking such as having their own Excel sheet or Notion checklists as CoursePlan doesn't fulfill their needs.
03

The credit transfer process is ambiguous
Transferring credits into Cornell is an ambiguous process where students can argue for credits to apply while other transferred credits can count for multiple courses and can be distributed in different ways.
User personas
to consider while designing
I created two user personas to focus on while designing. These were helpful in making sure I met both transfer student and study abroad student pain points.
User journey mapping
to understand target design opportunity areas

By mapping out the emotions and feelings of both transfer and study abroad students while trying to add their credits to CoursePlan, I was able to pin point where I can target my design focus to provide them with the ideal solution.
Understanding what student
input looks like
‍
01

Subject of class
Students have a subject associated with the class. For Biology classes for example, this is BIO.
02

Class code / number + Course title
Similar to Cornell class structure, other schools also have class codes and course titles.
03

Distribution requirement
‍Lastly, students can see what their transfer or study abroad course will fulfill distribution wise. These however can be changed year-to-year, argued for, or apply to multiple different courses.
Design decisions
for distribution requirements
As most of the ambiguity comes from the distribution requirement placement of this process, I decided to hone in on it. I created three different design iterations here to determine what would be the best solution for transfer and study abroad students.
Equivalent Course
Simplifies the process of figuring out the distribution requirements, limits users when there isn’t an equivalent course
Manual Selection
More flexibility in choosing requirements based on advisor input, can be a lot to figure out for the user, information overload
Directly Editing the Progress Bar
Can easily edit the progress bar and see current progress, might be confusing to navigate
Combing iterations 1 + 2
for efficiency and to reduce ambiguity
By combining the ability to select either an equivalent course or manually select distribution requirements, users have options. They can be efficient if an existing equivalent course exists, or they can navigate ambiguity by selecting the distribution requirements from their advisor.
Final designs live and being
used by users today
Our team officially launched Blank Course Cards on CoursePlan in November 2025 for all students to use. We are now collecting feedback and looking at KPIs to further improve Blank Course Cards 2.0.
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Lazim Jarif © 2025