Rate My Professors

As the lead product designer for the News division at Altice USA, I was responsible for the user experiences of three properties: Cheddar News, News12 and Rate My Professors.

Altice wanted to grow RMP and I was tasked with conducting research to understand how we might do that. Through reading site analytics and existing documentation, I learned quickly that RMP's three highest revenue generators were account registrations, page views and new ratings. Understanding these KPIs informed questions I asked students and professors to learn about how they use the site.
‍
After this initial research phase, I created storyboards for common problems that both students and professors faced. I conducted interviews walking students and professors through the storyboards to learn more about these pain points. Ultimately my research led our product team to launch several new features, with a plan to explore the expansion of the site into new territory.

‍

Something I discovered while conducting research was that most students used non-school-affiliated email addresses to schedule interviews. I looked into the emails associated with registrations on on RateMyProfessors.com and students similarly did not use their .edu addresses. This led our team to build an OAuth signup flow that increased registrations by 20% month over month.

In interviews, students often told me in interviews that they use RMP in high school to gauge overall student satisfaction at colleges and universities they were interested in to determine which schools they wanted to apply to. After consulting with my team, I designed a Compare Schools feature, which added an additional 200K pageviews per month for RMP.

I did a competitive analysis for RMP, which showed us many popular and newer rating sites that were more focused on courses than on professors. Through more interviews I learned students thought this was more constructive since many professor ratings were less objective in their evaluation.

This led to a painted door test that hyperlinked the departments on professor profiles to see if students would click the link. It resulted in more than 100,000 clicks over a 3 week span. Plans for department and course ratings were put on the RMP roadmap with a validated approach that would increase ratings sitewide by significant margins.