Problem

How might we improve the experience of users with busy daily schedules with a variety of ranging responsibilities and commitments?

When I started this project, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in the proliferation of millions of workers and students transitioning many of their activities online — it’s understandable that such a drastic change would result in many obstacles that might occur with people working from home.

Even after many facets of life returned to normal as the pandemic receded, there were many flaws (exacerbated by Covid-19) revealed within the existing structures in place for students to actively participate in their classes and activities.

User Research

To better understand how I could simplify schedule maintenance and communication for students, I interviewed several college students with a variety of commitments outside of school. I broke down my research goals into different categories to better inform my design approach:

Scheduling

What do students want out of a scheduling tool? How are they using existing ones?

Most student agree that transitioning into a hybrid world where life happens both online and in-person makes scheduling essential. Having all of their commitments and responsibilities organized in one place is vital to their daily routines.

In addition, most existing calendars are very rigid in their functionality; most of them are usually being used to schedule “important events” like academic and work commitments. Furthermore, people usually have to schedule these commitments on their own after finding out from superiors which opens scheduling to room for error.

With these findings in mind, I wanted to design a tool that would encourage and allow users to

• Be more versatile with the parameters of the things they use the calendar for
• Organize their schedules with more ease by integrating communications for course administration and managers

Communication Flow

Students

How are students finding and communicating with other people in their classes and extracurriculars?

The general consensus among all interviewees was that communicating with people they find in classes is a mixed bag — not everyone is on the same platforms which complicates correspondence.

Administrators

How are administrators broadcasting relevant information to students/employees?

“One of my peeves with how Covid centralized most of my activities online is how dependent my activities have become on the Internet and how I have like 2 different places I have to look for announcements for my classes and work-study job.”

Again, the overarching issue lies within the way that users have to communicate with relevant parties from different parts of their schedule; high-level information is always having to be kept up with on different platforms which makes organizing schedules and routines a pain.

Knowing how existing communications among potential users work, I wanted to take my design vision towards a tool that would consolidate all of a user's activities in a way that would allow them to easily communicate with relevant parties on a single platform.

Process

With my primary user research findings, I set out to design a tool that would allow users to better organize their schedules and holistic daily routines and streamline communication between people among a variety of jobs, activities and classes.

User Flow

After running this iteration by student subjects, I was met with a few critiques and suggestions:

• One unanimous feature people inquired about was whether or not this tool could integrate student’s university accounts to better access data and information from those platforms.
• I decided to add the option to login/sign-in with their school accounts to make information accessible across multiple platforms.
• It would be nice to have a visible tracker to see how many outstanding tasks/events are left in the day upon app launch.
• In addition to giving users the ability to check off tasks and events they’ve finished, I also added a progress bar greeting users when they open up the tool
• The messaging function would be greatly improved by linking people to their respective events instead of having users manually search for their profiles.
• Taking this comment into account, I integrated profiles into the calendar events and allowing users to message them directly from the event card. Now, after messaging people from the calendar schedule page, all messages would be accessible from the messages page.
• People weren’t very interested in interacting with the statistics page or the log page.
• When asked, many of the testers said that tracking usage patterns and schedule details aren’t a huge priority for them. Since the focal point of this tool is to help people organize their schedules and communicate with relevant parties, I decided to get rid of the statistics page altogether.
• To still give users the option of taking notes related to their event schedules without having to dedicate an entire page for the function, I incorporated a note taking section in the event cards.

Results

Login

On launch, users start at the landing page — if they’ve signed up already they can login with their username and password and proceed to the home page if not, they can sign up with various accounts including school accounts like Canvas

For the onboarding process, I also wanted to emphasize the key features without lengthening the process anymore then it needed to be.

Home

Since the nature of a scheduling app has a lot of information relevant to daily use, I wanted to simplify the interface experience as much as I could.

Per user testing, the user is greeted with a progress bar to see how much of the day’s outstanding tasks have been completed. They can also check off and click on the event cards that have been listed in chronological order. Clicking on an event will pull up the event details on a separate page, which can also be accessed through the Schedule’s page

Schedule

The function of the Schedule tab was always going to be one of the most vital features of the tool. One of my biggest priorities from the inception of the design process was to make sure that this part of the tool was as functional and easy to use as possible without sacrificing visual appeal.

There’s a lot of content that needs to fit into the page which is why I settled on a slider on the top to scroll through days in the calendar. The bottom half of the page is where the daily schedule resides fitted with a timeline and time marker. In the timeline portion of the schedule page, users can access event details from their corresponding event cards and can change the details of events, set reminders, and even message event participants

Add New Event

At any part of the user journey, the user can also add an event to their schedule by tapping the icon in the middle of the navigation bar. From here, the slider appears and lets the user add event details to their discretion, invite other participants, and select the event category.

Message

The crux of the Message tab was to allow users to better connect and communicate with the people relevant to their everyday activities, whether it be work, school, or other extracurriculars.

From the message tab, users can access past conversations with other users on the app (including ones sent from the Schedule tab) and reply to messages as well as send out outgoing messages to other people.

Next Steps

Throughout the design process, I was really focused on making this a really cohesive and easy-to-use experience for students that are bombarded by the plethora of events they have to deal with in a post-Covid world both in-person and online. I’d like to further explore how I could better design this tool in a way that would allow people like course instructors/managers to make announcements to their students/workers.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to examine how we could more smoothly integrate data from multiple communication and education platforms into a centralized application to support a wider demographic of users.