Upper Limit of Items for a Browse Experience

Question

I am working on an application for browsing academic programs at a large university. The primary goal is to aid in discovery of majors/degrees that a student would otherwise not know existed, as well as helping new students understand the scope of topics they could potentially get a degree in. I am of the opinion that the best high-level experience to support these goals would be a filter-able browse tool so students could :

• scroll through all programs to see what our university offers
• limit the list by criteria that are important to them (degree type, topic, etc.)

The problem I am running into is figuring out what level to present. There are two in the running:

1. Major: The pros are there are only 150 of these, so the list would be more manageable for browsing. The cons are that this would create an additional layer before the student gets to the information about the degree (requirements, admission, etc.)
2. Degree: The pros are that this is where the majority of the information lives, so getting students to this information is important. Cons there are around 450 of these, so browsing would be a nightmare (or, at least I think, which gets me to my question).

Does anyone have any research related to the upper limit of items users will browse, or any experience with a similar problem? As this is for a major life decision, my experience is that students tend to dig deeper than they would for a small purchase or web search, however, it still feels like getting into the 400+ range is probably pushing it.

Answer 1

What about if you think of it from a Google search perspective?

A search typically brings a resultset of millions, in pages of 30 or so...but one typically never goes past page 3 before trying to refine the search. Google has certain key techniques to refine the search, which quickly become very easy to use.

Answer 2

This is a very difficult task no doubt and I would agree most schools don't do a great job of presenting the wealth of options a student has to choose from.

Here's my thought degrees vs majors doesn't really matter as much. You can do either one. What would help prospective students may involve creating similar categories to lump similar things together. I will refer to these prospective categories as buckets.

Here's what I would do , get some data for incoming students to see what makes them choose their major (expected income, work-life balance, the industry it will place them in, stress). Then I would look for some data from students who switched their major and see if I can identify themes or buckets.

Next I would have different views that groups these majors or degrees based on these themes. These may include expected salary, the percentage employed, stress level of major, friendliest majors to be able to work from home, which industry are you trying to work in. If you can give them more buckets to browse over and if they identify with that bucket then they will look at the majors there as opposed to having to read through 150 or 400 degrees.

I still would have a view showing all the different degrees or majors I would just have different views with these buckets or categories to help them triage a smaller subset. Determining the buckets is hard. But the way I envision it is a person is coming there because their parent was a roughneck who worked in the oil industry and they want to enter that industry. They then see browse majors by career fields or industry types. They then see the energy and initially, they were hesitant about petroleum engineering or Chemical engineering due to the stress levels of those majors but they discover your mechanical engineering program that also lands students in that industry.