UT Scheduler+

UT Scheduler+ is an app focused on centralizing student information. Through the app, students can access COVID-19 resources available on campus, organize their schedule, and anything that would help make their transition back to campus smooth.

Goal: Help introduce and reintegrate UT students into campus life

Overview

Following the shelter in place order imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many college students found themselves attending classes online from their homes. As restrictions began to ease and students returned to campus, many found themselves in an unfamiliar place for the first time. With the overwhelming amount of information thrown at them, it is easy to forget where buildings are or having immediate access to events on campus. Because these students may not know where to go for COVID resources, navigate around campus, or get involved on their campus, we wanted to create an app that would help ease students back into campus by providing them with resources centralized in one place. Thus we began thinking of ways to help ease and re-integrate students into campus.

Timeline

February - March 2022

Team

Stephanie Cyrill
Jainali Hira
Trevor Holt
Deborah Kang
Kaylee Su

My Contributions

Interviewing
Wireframing
Prototyping

Tools Used

Figma
FigJam

Persona

To channel and develop features that would be included in our app, we created a persona called 'Nervous Jack', who modeled what a student coming to campus for the first time would look like.

Competitive Analysis & Feature Selection

Based on Nervous Jack, our team knew that the app had to have COVID-19 resources and be a platform where all UT information is stored in one place. As we looked at other UT apps, we found the opportunity points for our app to provide another way to centralize campus information.

As we researched other apps that provided UT campus information, we found that while many of these provided useful information on focused areas (i.e. sports or COVID), none of the apps included:

App Tutorial or Oboarding
Campus Navigation
A way to export course schedule to personal calendar
A place where students could ask questions and receive answers directly
Student Life

From this, our team generated a list of must-haves for the UT Scheduler+ app.

User Flows

We came up with the following flows that we anticipate users of the app would follow. The following flows are included:
‍
- Login & Dashboard
- Academics
- Student Life
- Schedule & Campus Navigation

Once these components were established, we moved onto designing the app in Figma.

User Testing

‍To test the app, we interviewed three users that either currently frequenting campus or enrolled during the pandemic and asked them to complete the following tasks:

Logging in
Completing the Tutorial
Ask Me Anything
Exporting to Google Calendar
Exploring Resources
Finding the 'Settings'

Based on these tasks, we wanted to test the usability of the app and observe how users would interact with its features.

Learnings

While users thought UT Scheduler+ was easy to use and intuitive, we learned that they would have preferred if the app could be personalized. Users highlighted the importance of being able to personalize the app as some mentioned that they did not use Google Calendar and would have liked the option to connect another software to the app (ex. Keep or Notion).

If more time were given on the project, we would have liked to refine the app further and ideate different features that could be included in the app to increase its usefulness.