Student Schedule App
Problem Space
Students at the University of Michigan can unanimously agree on a few sentiments: Go Blue, don’t step on the M, and the Canvas app sucks.
It’s difficult to track/manage school assignments and due dates, with daily tasks:
No single app that allows students to track all their daily tasks
Neither Canvas nor Google calendar keep track of school assignments and daily tasks simultaneously or automatically
Students have to manually input everything: school assignments, daily events, reminders and tasks
Our team created a new interface to integrate the different sources of tasks all in one place.
My Role
Primarily: Design Lead
But also,
Co-Product Manager
Design system manager
Feature prioritization
Researcher
Copywriter
Goal
Design a mobile application that includes the following:
Allows students to manage their school assignments while integrating life tasks
Integrates with the Canvas infrastructure that the University of Michigan already offers students
Lets students prioritize and customize their assignments in multiple views for maximum efficiency and organization
Need Finding
We interviewed over 200 students at the University of Michigan to find out what they would need from a scheduling app. These were the most popular features that students said that a scheduling app would have:
-Seamless integration with Canvas to auto import their assignments
easy to add new events
ability to blend school and personal events
clear visual of how their time is divided
ability to add assignment due dates and correlating work time
easy to understand interface
many liked color coding
customizability
notifications
views: daily/weekly/monthly
User flow diagram
The user flow diagram solidified our site map and determined the screens we would need to create for our users to achieve their goals.
Here, we determined the basic IA for our app, knowing that it would contain the following pages:
planner
calendar
dashboard
assignment/event view
settings
Initial Wireframes
The user flow diagram solidified our site map and determined the screens we would need to create for our users to achieve their goals.
Here, we determined the basic IA for our app, knowing that it would contain the following pages:
planner
calendar
dashboard
assignment/event view
settings
User flow diagram
The user flow diagram solidified our site map and determined the screens we would need to create for our users to achieve their goals.
Here, we determined the basic IA for our app, knowing that it would contain the following pages:
planner
calendar
dashboard
Initial user testing with lo-fi prototype
Initial usability testing revealed some important changes we could make to the prototype to make it more intuitive and user friendly. These were mainly related to the flow of the user experience and where users would expect to go within the flow as indicated by the UX.
We made the recommended changes and produced a hi-fidelity prototype with interaction for a fully functioning prototype:
Big Emily Moment: design system and interaction build
To take the prototype to the next level, I fully built out the interactions in Figma to make the prototype fully functioning. Here, I also designed the UI elements such as buttons, labels, styles, and colors.
Outcomes
After the initial changes to the interactive prototype were made, we tested the hi-fidelity prototype with about 40 users.
User feedback was overewhelmingly positive with user sentiments including “easy to use” “professional,” and “when can we get this app instead of Canvas?!”
On our satisfaction survey at the end of the usability tests, nearly all users said that they would use the app and 100% of the users said it was better than Canvas.