Background

Students go through the cumbersome process of choosing courses and scheduling for them every semester or quarter. Along with ensuring that the classes don’t conflict with each other, students often have preferences for professors, timings, and prior commitments like part-time jobs, that create blockers in their schedule. Schedulr solves this problem with a simple process where students pick their preferences first, and are presented with potential schedules.

Key Considerations
- Simple, refined steps
-  Interactive interface to visualize preferences and schedules
- Enhanced and immersive experience

The idea was to break down the process into simple, attainable steps, that the user can go through without feeling overwhelmed. A large part of this was to maintain a clean, uncluttered screen, and gather a sizable amount of information from the user about their preferences and courses.

The first iteration approached the problem in a turbo-tax style, asking questions about common preferences, any patterns that are noticed amongst other students. Students would go through a series of questions to add preferences about blockers. It also focused heavily on branding with two/thirds of the screen being blue.

The second iteration addressed the fact that students may not want to answer an array of questions. Having a single interface with the focus on the calendar will allow students to choose their preferences and be able to visualize the blockers for their week. The add classes screen was also refreshed by changing it to a two-column view, making it less cumbersome. Allowing for the same options in an accordion hides the non-required elements of adding courses, and makes the screen less content-heavy.

The last iteration was focused on delivering a minimum viable product, which meant excluding the blockers in the first release. There was also a large rework of the steps, and user flow. The landing page now became the search page, eliminating an extra click needed to get to the app. The searched course information is organized in a similar fashion to the previous iteration, but the selected courses list was redesigned as a tile grid. Not only did the tiles provide the opportunity to display more information, but it allowed for larger text and better readability. The left side of the bottom screen then became the action area. When a user adds a course, the description screen changes to a preferences screen. This was key because without preferences, the number of possible schedules was becoming extremely large. Having the preferences there did not necessarily force, but certainly emphasized the options, increasing likelihood of choosing preferences. The preferences could be revisited by clicking on one of the tiles.

As I started to see the data we had to work with, it became clear that certain course restrictions and notes could not be included, because the source had inconsistent data. This meant that the CRN’s and individual sections would have to be displayed in the possible schedules, with a link to the page of the section so users can confirm any restrictions.

Finally the summary page was designed to be revisited, as opposed to the previous idea of providing a file to download. This allows for users to even share their schedules with peers, or advisors.