Open Course
Project Overview
Open Course is a website that allows University of Michigan students to easily create and join a study group. While the original product goal was to facilitate scheduled study groups for specific classes, user feedback revealed a growing need for more spontaneous, low-commitment options. This insight led to the development of Live Study Group, a feature that allows students to create temporary study groups in real time.
With Live Study Group, students studying alone can quickly set up a group, making it visible to others who want to join in person. This feature not only helps foster spontaneous collaboration, but it also helps students locate groups that already have an available study spot.
User Interviews
We interviewed 5 University of Michigan Students to understand their motivation and experiences when it comes to finding study groups. Our main research goals were to:
Understand students' current approaches to finding and organizing study groups
Identify factors that influence their decision to join a study group
Gather feedback on the potential usefulness of the Live Study Group feature
Affinity Map
After conducting our research, we wanted to synthesize this new information in order to evaluate the users’ needs and goals. We organized all of the notes we took on a FigJam board in order to identify commonalities between the users and figure out what to prioritize.
Here are the key needs that we identified from the affinity map:
Location Transparency – Students value knowing the study group's exact location.
Scheduling Accuracy – Date and time details are crucial, with emphasis in ensuring posts are all up to date.
Social Dynamics & Productivity – Students want some sort of “social scale" to gauge if a group is more on the productive or talkative side.
Group Composition – Students prefer knowing who’s attending.
Maximum Capacity – Students want to be able to manage the group size.
Our affinity map revealed three key user needs that consistently emerged across interviews and were crucial to the feature’s success. We then brainstormed solutions, carefully evaluating the feasibility of each.
Need #1: Indicators of the group dynamic (a “social scale”)
We aimed to accomplish this by designing a feature that allows users to categorize their productivity levels, indicating whether they are "locked in" or "yapping." These are colloquial terms that college students often use to express their study habits, and users indicated that incorporating this familiar lingo into our designs would make the feature more attractive to our target audience.
Need #2: Updated study session details
To keep posts up to date, we implemented a countdown feature where Live posts would automatically expire after two hours. Posters have the ability to extend their session by refreshing for an additional hour if needed.
Need #3: Restricted group access
Since users expressed a preference for more control over who joins their study group, we introduced the option to make sessions either “Invite Only” or “Open to All.” In an “Invite Only” session, participants must send a request to join, which the poster can accept or decline. Additionally, posters can set a maximum capacity to manage group size effectively.
Product Requirements Document
Based on the needs that we outlined, we created a PRD in order to clarify our problem statement, establish our goals and metrics, and outline the key features.
User Flow
We additionally created a simple representation of the user flow outlined in the PRD in order to clarify the steps users would take to join and extend a Live post. We additionally coordinated with developers to ensure they had the tools they needed to implement this flow, as shown on the right.
Wireframes
We began to decide how the content on the Live posts would be organized based on the goals we wanted to meet and the features we planned to implement. We played around with different card sizes, layouts, and filters. As we were brainstorming, we made sure to continuously refer to our user research and ensure that the cards contained information that would be valuable for our users. We additionally consulted developers frequently in order to understand what would be most feasible.
Given the amount of information we wanted to include in each Live post based on user feedback, our goal was to organize the content in a way that wasn't overwhelming. We experimented with the amount of text, identified which filters were essential, and focused on optimizing clarity while keeping the interface simple.
We tested out different ways to position the people attending, the group dynamics scale, and decided if we wanted the cards to be horizontal or vertical.
A/B Testing
After finalizing the content and basic structure of the Live posts, we conducted A/B testing with our target users to refine our design decisions.
Optimizing Layout
First, we tested two-column and three-column layouts for the posts.
Users preferred the two-column layout, finding the three-column version overwhelming and harder to read. As designers, we agreed that incorporating more white space would enhance readability and make it simpler for users to join groups.
Social Scale vs. Tags
Next, we gathered feedback on the 'social scale' feature. One version incorporated a slider that allowed users to adjust the scale freely, while the other used predefined tags for users to select the group dynamic.
We found that users strongly preferred the version with the slider over the tags, as it offered greater control and flexibility. With tags, they felt restricted to just two group dynamics, but the slider allowed them to adjust their productivity level as needed. While developers noted that implementing the slider would be more challenging, the overwhelmingly positive user feedback confirmed that the trade-off was worthwhile.
Next Steps
We finished designing the Live feature in February 2025, and our developers are currently working on building the Open Course website. We check in and communicate with them every week to ensure that our designs are effectively developed. The website is expected to go live in Spring 2025, and we hope to track its metrics then to continuously improve Open Course’s experience.
Reflection
Working on Open Course is one of my most collaborative experiences to date. It was the first time I communicated so frequently with both engineers and product managers throughout the design process, which taught me how valuable cross-functional collaboration is to building realistic and user-centered features. I also learned the importance of iteration, as the concept of live study groups itself emerged from user testing, when we discovered that students preferred more spontaneous ways to connect and study. Seeing how user feedback reshaped our product direction reminded me that good design evolves with real users’ needs.