Schedule Builder

Overview

Redesigning the process of using schedule builder, UC Davis' official course registration tool, as well as the navigation to heighten the user experience.

I ran through a six-week design sprint process to redesign schedule builder, leading the prototyping and A/B testing portion of the project (equally collaborated on other parts of the design sprint).

Project Details

My Role
UI/UX, Visual Design, User Research, Led prototyping and A/B testing

Team
Kiara (Project Mentor), Meghna, Aeon, Kai

Tools
Figma, Google Forms, Notion, Slack

Duration
Six weeks, Winter 2020

What’s the issue?

Students undergo time consuming user experience due to excessive clicking and scrolling due to the unclear navigation and organization. Many of schedule builder’s features are hidden under tabs or duplicated, leaving users with multiple ways to access a function, such as searching for a course. (Pictured below, students can search for courses in different tabs, not consistent with one another)

This problem mainly affects...
New students such as freshman and transfers students, however, this also affects students looking to make a schedule in a short amount of time.

This is what schedule builder currently looks like. Users are able to access features such as searching for a course in various ways, making it confusing for first time users.

Research: Understanding our audience

Research Plan

To approach the redesign of Schedule Builder and develop a solution, our team worked to better understand the needs and concerns of our target audience. Being that Schedule Builder is a central course registration tool for students at UC Davis, our target audience naturally fell to students.

We planned to do a competitive audit but it was difficult as we didn’t have access to course registration programs from other universities. As a team we decided that since our main research goals was to better understand how the platform is utilized and where their pain points lie, a survey would be our next course of action.

Survey + insights

We sent out a survey asking students about how often they utilize Schedule Builder on a regular basis, what’s their overall satisfaction and asked them to rate how comfortable they are utilizing certain features. The rating questions were based on a scale of 1-5 (1 being extremely negative, 5 being extremely positive) and here is what they had to say.

Rated 2.95/5 using schedule builder for the first time

3.19/5 building schedules without conflicting classes

3.33/5 looking up classes they’re interested in

Interviews

Though the survey was a good way to get insights from our audience, we decided further research was needed to better understand what students are struggling with and what they wished exists, so eight user interviews was conducted. Each team member conducted two interviews and here are key points that my interviewees mentioned.

Synthesis

To streamline the findings from interviews and prioritize the main focus areas we used affinity mapping to categorize related responses together.

This was helpful to understand the audience's goals and would lead the remainder of the design process
To further streamline the process, we took what was said and categorized it into visual presentation, convenience, accessibility, integration, features, and other

After categorizing them, as a team, we voted on three features that best encapsulated the user's pain points based on interviews

Key points

Reviewing the votes, they were slightly spread out. To narrow down our focus and ensure that we had enough time for our design, we focused on three points, as they had nearly everyone's vote. However, we didn't disregard the two points that weren't pick, and found a way to incorporate it into the final design.

Refine the problem statement

While each user had a variety of needs and pain points, after categorizing and looking across all our users, we crafted a how might we statement that encapsulated our user’s main goals

Ideation & visual design

Sketches

Each one of us diverged and created solution sketches based on features that best hit the pain points of our users. Some things we considered were…

1. Restructuring how our users would look at their courses and schedule on the calendar

2. Making time conflicting courses more obvious to warn users ahead of time

3. Making course details easy to read and minimize the navigation on a page

Low-Fidelity

From our sketches, we split up to develop different portions of our low-fidelity wireframes. My task was centralized around the main calendar and scheduling portion of the interface. Focusing on how users would edit their schedules and how it would display different types of schedules such as the week, day, and finals view.

Mid Fidelity + Usability testing

User flow

In addition to developing low-fi wireframes, we created a usability testing script to prepare for user testing. This also allowed us to ensure we have the pages necessary for our mid fidelity wireframes and could prototype all the pages without any missing parts.

Mid-fidelity + usability testing

After developing both a user flow we developed the mid fidelity wireframes. At this stage we implemented colors, and a more cohesive design system.

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We had users run through tasks such as opening the schedule page, viewing different quarters, editing and saving their schedule, as well as searching for courses. Observing how they interacted with the prototype and if they ran into any problems.

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Things we looked out for...

How effortless is it to complete the assigned tasks?
How well does our assumed user flow align with our users' approach?

Insights

Based on user testing we found that many had trouble navigating the prototype and most weren't able to complete the tasks given to them.

Many noted that they were confused by the wording on the buttons which led them to being unsure of where to click to view different modes such as the finals schedule or how to edit their schedules.

Before proceeding to our final solution we decided to conduct A/B testing to get more insight and clear up portions that users found to be confusing.

Insights