In recent years, universities have been offering a rising number of courses, creating not only greater flexibility of choice, but simultaneously a more complex decision-making process for students. Therefore, this paper seeks to identify key aspects that should be considered when designing a course recommender system (CRS). To achieve this, the paper introduces the field of course selection as a decision-making process, and a suitable area of application for a recommender system (RS). Through an analysis of students’ selection criteria and processes, the paper develops requirements and a prototypical implementation, following the double diamond design process model. The implementation is evaluated via think-aloud user tests in its initial iteration. The results of this study indicate that a multidimensional approach shall be taken to optimize the user experience. As an additional contribution, we identify six guidelines for the design of effective CRS.