A software designed to help students register for classes launched new features on Oct. 17 in preparation for the upcoming registration season. 

UT Registration Plus, a student-developed Google Chrome extension, allows users to visualize their schedule, transfer unique course numbers during registration and learn details about prospective classes, including average grades, past syllabi and prerequisites.  

For the past year, government senior Isaiah Rodriguez and his team have been working on updates such as backup calendars, color customization, updated grade distributions and faster course search. 

As a freshman, Rodriguez said he noticed nearly every student relied on the extension for course registration. While he found it useful, he saw significant potential for improvement, particularly in adding features like backup scheduling and enhancing the product’s overall design and user experience. In February 2023, he reached out to Sriram Hariharan, an alumnus who created the extension in 2018.

With the help of Hariharan and a couple of his friends, Rodriguez said he founded the organization Longhorn Developers and began to update the extension at the beginning of the year. 

“(Longhorn Developers) is a student-led organization and was formally established in January of this year,” Rodriguez, chief operations and design officer for Longhorn Developers, said. “That’s when we recruited about 10 more students to help with the development of the update that everyone sees right now.”

Rodriguez said commitment to student feedback, a cornerstone of the development process, defines the new update. He distributed a survey asking what features students wanted incorporated or improved in the new version of the extension, and it received over 300 responses. Among the most popular requests were course schedules for backup options and custom colors for course blocks.  

Public health freshman Aleesha Kumar said the new features have been especially helpful this semester, and they provide her with greater flexibility and personalization in her course planning.

“In the College of Natural Sciences, we are put into small little groups where we have the same classes, but this time around, we still haven’t gotten it,” Kumar said. “It’s (less than) three weeks until registration, so I think having different schedules that you can play with is helpful.” 

Rodriguez said Longhorn Developers could not incorporate all of the suggestions in this update, but they may incorporate them in the next update. However, some student suggestions simply aren’t possible, Rodriguez said. For example, UT notified the developers that they cannot include a feature where the extension automatically registers students for the courses in their planned calendars due to fairness issues and concerns that it would crash the UT registration website, he said. 

Rodriguez said he is excited about an auto-generating schedule feature he hopes can launch next semester. He said the feature would allow the extension to create its own schedules based on user preferences, such as class times or professor choices. 

In a LinkedIn post earlier this month, Hariharan said the project has come a long way since 2018, having served over 50,000 students. 

“Knowing that this tool, born from a desire to help others while learning, continues to make a difference in the UT community fills me with immense pride and excitement for the future,” Hariharan said in the post. “Even today, every time I see that little orange square in the corner of someone’s browser, it brings a smile to my face.”