The team behind the UT Registration Plus Chrome extension is working to roll out a useful update, inspired by input from the student body.

Creator and UT alumnus Sriram Hariharan said the team is calling the milestone update “UT Registration Plus 2.0,” and they put together a survey for students to fill out about what updates they want to see.

The UT Registration Plus extension was created by Hariharan in 2018 to make registration at the University easier for students. No large updates have been made to the extension since its first few in 2018 and 2019.

“Besides some minor changes, (UT Registration Plus) hasn’t changed much,” Hariharan said. “We want to take all the feedback we’ve been getting from users and put it into the next iteration.”

The extension began as a personal summer project for Hariharan to make something that he and his peers would benefit from using. It has since become an open-source project while he leads and maintains it. Anyone can go to the Registration Plus GitHub or Discord for the extension to discuss it with people who work on the extension.

“When I ended up graduating, I transitioned it toward being an open-source project, so that other people throughout the UT community could contribute and add features,” Hariharan said. “If they found a bug, they will be able to push out the fix to it.”

Backup schedules have been an idea coming up in many of the survey submissions and are scheduled to be in the mega-update, said team member Isaiah Rodriguez. Currently, students can only make one course schedule in the extension to plan their registration time.

“They should add (backup schedules) because nine times out of 10, you’re not going to your first choice and then you’re scrambling to find the other unique numbers,” journalism freshman Sophia Sandavol said. “So I think having backups would be really beneficial.”

The update should also be bringing visual changes to UT Registration Plus to fix its slightly outdated look, government sophomore Rodriguez said. He said students talked about a desire for it to look more modern as well as more accessible colors since some of the current colors are difficult to use for colorblind students.

Rodriguez said another improvement students asked for is updated grade distribution data. He said the extension currently offers a grade distribution chart for each course offered at the University, however, some classes have no data. Rodriguez said this makes it difficult for students to make a prediction on how they will perform in the class.

The team plans for the update to be released before the start of spring 2024 registration. A select few participants are currently testing out the beta version to ensure that it works for all students when the next registration period rolls around.

“We do want students, especially incoming freshmen, and students from orientation, to be able to hear about the extension and also be able to use it,” Rodriguez said.