  Articulation agreements provide more transparency about how community college
courses will transfer and fulfill university requirements. However, the
literature displays conflicting results on whether articulation agreements
improve transfer-related outcomes; perhaps one contributor to these conflicting
research results is the subpar user experience of articulation agreement
reports and the websites that host them. Accordingly, we surveyed and
interviewed California community college transfer students to gather their
suggestions for new academic-advising-related software features for the ASSIST
website. ASSIST is California's official centralized repository of articulation
agreement reports between public California community colleges and
universities. We analyzed the open-ended survey and interview data using
structural coding and thematic analysis. We identified four themes around
students' software feature suggestions for ASSIST: (a) features that automate
laborious academic advising tasks, (b) features to reduce ambiguity with
articulation agreements, (c) features to mitigate mistakes in term-by-term
course planning, and (d) features to facilitate online advising from advisors
and student peers.
