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Computer Science and Software Engineering Capstone Presentations

Summer Quarter

August 21, 2020

Matt Johnson

"Virtual Academic Advisor UI"

(UWB CSS Faculty Research)

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Erika Parsons

Abstract

The Virtual Academic Advisor is an ongoing project with the goal of generating academic schedules based on user preferences in order to save valuable time for not only the student, but their advisor as well; which was based on advisor struggles at Community Colleges. Currently, there is a basic backend scheduling module that was built by graduate students that was in need of a modern UI solution to display the input and output data to the user. My role on the team was to build this solution from the ground up using the React.js framework as a baseline. At the moment, EvCC is a case study using extremely outdated web pages to view schedules and our web app was meant to be an all-around upgrade while incorporating our schedule generation system. In addition to fulfilling the basic needs of the project, it was also necessary to evaluate the composition of the application from a usability perspective to ensure that in practice, any given user would feel satisfied by the provided functionality. This was done by exploring different formats and ideas for the page, such as clearly defined use areas, drag and drop for commonly moved elements of a schedule, tuned searchable dropdowns for lengthy lists, among other things. All this was done while maintaining a codebase that is highly modularized and easily understandable through code comments and thorough documentation.

Updated August 19, 2020, 15:50