Overview
Bobcast Search is an course search frontend for the NYU community, created in React and Redux with data calls to Albert Liu's Schedge API backend. It aims to be faster, better designed, and more feature rich than the official NYU course search. While the original design, planning, and programming of the project had been my own, once I opened sourced it I started coordinating with other members of the NYU Computer Science community to further develop it.
Inspiration
There has long been considerable consternation at NYU with the state of the university's official course search website. To list a short subset of the issues students have experienced: the design doesn't prioritize important information, webpages take forever to load if they work at all, there's no good way to filter courses by anything other than a slow textual search, you can't press the browser's back button to go back a page, and you can't open links in new tabs to look at multiple courses at a time.
I sought to improve the course search experience through designing and building an entirely new platform making use of my friend Albert Liu's homemade Rest API to query class data scraped daily from NYU's official search.
User Research
Knowing how large of a project I was undertaking, I wanted to make sure that I fully understand the differing needs of the wide array of students for whom I was building this website.