Berkeleytime Scheduler

Streamlining course planning and scheduling, enabling users to select from 11,000+ courses with ease.

Responsibilities
As a product designer at Berkeleytime↗, I worked in a cross-functional team to pitch, design, and ship Berkeleytime Scheduler. I also validated feature functionality and design system expansions with the front-end engineering team. Features I focused on primarily were editing schedule drafts, as well as course addition user flow.

Role
Product Designer

Duration
9 months

Team
5 Designers
9 Engineers
1 Product Manager

CONTEXT

Berkeleytime is a volunteer-run platform that enables users to quickly filter and browse through 11,000+ UC Berkeley courses.

It allows students to look up courses from previous semesters, view current enrollment trends, and examine past grade distributions.

CalCentral is the official UC Berkeley site where students create semester schedules, and enroll in classes.

This is where students typically will create, edit, and compare different schedules.

PROBLEM

All class schedule planning had to be done through CalCentral, the official UC Berkeley enrollment site, which had major usability issues.

After identifying potential courses to take in Berkeleytime, most students would then create schedules for the next semester in CalCentral. However, they often ran into frustrating UX issues.

PAIN POINTS

Scheduling classes on CalCentral is a convoluted process.

Based on user research and and an internal UX audit, I identified the main painpoints of current scheduling via CalCentral:

  • Class shopping cart is text-heavy without additional visual aids

  • Must keep mental track of info on multiple pages to compare different timetables

  • Course conflicts are difficult to resolve

OPPORTUNITY

Improve the UX of course schedule creation and planning, while also increasing user retention on Berkeleytime.

When pitching Berkeleytime Scheduler to the rest of the team, I also stressed that this was a feature that had been requested for a while, and could potentially boost user retention on Berkeleytime.

SOLUTION

Berkeleytime Scheduler allows users to view information and make schedule modifications all within a single page, reducing the cognitive load when enrolling in classes.

View and select from 11,000+ classes in a single page.

View and pick from all possible sections for a class, using either the dropdown class lists on the left or the calendar blocks on the right. Hovering over a specific discussion timeslot will change it from semi-opaque to fully opaque.

Keep all your courses and schedules in a single place.

Students can bookmark potential classes to quickly refer to them later. They can later view saved classes in their Berkeleytime profile, and then add these classes to schedule drafts.

Find and resolve schedule conflicts in just a few clicks.

Schedule overlapping classes, temporarily or permanently, without irritating error messages. To delete a timeslot, click on the calendar block to access the delete option, or unselect it in the list view.

IMPACT

Launched Scheduler MVP for 26,000+ users; 22,000+ schedules created so far.

After supporting front-end and back-end engineering as we aligned on design specifications, it was exciting to see Scheduler ship.

Provided a more intuitive course planning experience than CalCentral (official schedule enrollment site).

“[Scheduler] has been hugely successful, and many users say they prefer it to the CalCentral enrollment planner.”

— Current Berkeleytime Product Manager

REFLECTIONS AND TAKEAWAYS

I learned how to communicate and collaborate with product and engineering.

As a designer, I knew all the new changes to wireframes and features like the back of my hand—so it was easy to forget that the engineers weren’t going to start on the same page as me. Patiently answering their questions and walking them step-by-step through user flows helped the engineers co-design Scheduler, kept me up-to-date with what would be feasible, and helped me re-examine and polish past design decisions.

I learned that real-life design projects are considerably less linear than class projects.

I’d taken a lot of design classes, so I was familiar with the standard design cycle processes. However, I sometimes deviated from what I had been taught as I took on this project. In time, I began to realize that real-life design projects are messy and non-linear, and that critical reasoning conquers formula when it comes to solving real-life problems.