Student Planner

Students often struggle to manage hectic school scheduling on a digital platform since pen and paper planners are, at least in 2022, obsolete. I set out to solve this problem. So here is the situation, students are often juggling three or four classes, all with multiple assignments, labs, and exams. On top of that, students often have extracurricular activities like sports, arts, and socializing. Being able to know what’s coming up, what’s really important and needs a lot of attention, and having it in the palm of their hands, could solve a lot of problems for students. I decided there were three basic issues to tackle:

1. The option to share a schedule, grades, and assignments

2. Take notes

3. Schedule reminders

The Early Research

1. Habit tasks roll over to the next day when left undone

2. No dependency management

3. No useful note-taking capabilities with the current app

4. To-do’s getting lost in a sea of to-do’s — no real organization/prioritization

So, how did we solve these problems?

Instead of taking all idea’s in at once, I thought it best that we make a user story map following the biggest complaints among digital planners. The stars on the green post-its all signify the most important features that needed to be included in the app to help alleviate those pet peeves.

Wireframing

We started with Low-Fidelity Wireframes. I used the program Balsamiq to do this.

My take on the student planner was to have a daily view with inspiration from a planner called Area book, an app developed by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Events would be planned via a two-handed clock, being selected from start to finish. The calendar would remain the same among the team in the early stages. For event creation, I decided to remove the two-handed clock when making events for good practice since I knew that in a real-life job environment the developers would be irked, to say the least. So we thought adding a revolving timer would be a better way to implement the time the user wanted.

True to our original philosophy of simplicity, I, along with the advice of other team members, decided to make the add event feature much simpler and add an overlay to all aspects of the ‘Add Event’ page, seeing that the Mid-Fi portion was unnecessarily complex and drawn out. Seeing this we went with each component in this section as an overlay for the main frame of the add event page.

High Fidelity Validation Testing

What good is a High-Fi design without a good test? Overall, our app received good praise from our users, except for a few minor issues.

1. When making an event for a specific date, the date field should be pre-populated for the date you choose, which we added via parent components in our event pages.

2. Checking off the to-do list needed to be less complex, which was solved by making checkmark components for each to-do item.

3. Prototypes, when made in the future should not be this vast and complex (looks like a spider web or rat’s nest.) This couldn’t be resolved due to time constraints (see bottom photo).