Project One: Courses & Class Sections
Where: FACTS SIS (school information system)
Audience: School administrators and registrars
Goal: To convert our existing Courses and Class Sections areas from ColdFusion to Angular, making the page more user friendly and adding desired features in the process.
Additional project notes:
This was Phase 3 of our Scheduling redesign project, in which we are completely revamping our very large Scheduling area.
My role: I was given what I see as a great honor: being the lead designer on our biggest key revenue initiative of 2024-2026. The previous scheduling software was designed in the late 90s/early 2000s, and has been a big point of contention with our users — losing our business a number of sales as a result. It was my job to reimagine this area, working closely with our users to create a competitive scheduling system that will make the sales department drool.
My Process
Initial feedback
While I always try to understand existing user wants going into a project, this was the first time I gathered such large-scale pre-project feedback. With the help of our Pendo content team, we released an in-app survey asking for user likes, dislikes, and wants for the existing Courses and Class Sections pages.
The survey was a massive success — garnering over 150 responses in three days.
I then cleaned up the data and took some of the best pieces of feedback (along with product team requests) and created a card sorting board that inspired the flow of the rest of the project. Pushing this redesign to be one of our most user-involved yet.
Sketches
When it comes to design ideation, I am a big paper and pencil person. I began sketching out my ideas, taking lots of notes and documenting my thoughts along the way.
Page Layout and General Screen
The existing system split the Courses and Classes pages up into two separate areas. The language also consistently confused our users because “Courses” and “Classes” sound like the same thing in conversation. The existing system also used buttons to take the user to each section of the new page, which felt like a very “broken” way of navigating. Finally, each screen needed a bit of a facelift, some wording or organization changes, and new features that our users craved.
Need: A cohesive layout that brings the Courses and Classes areas together and makes it clear what the differences between the two are.
Solution: Rebrand “Classes” to “Class Sections” to make it clearer what they are (individual instances of the course that have set rosters, a time of day, and an assigned instructor). Bring Courses and Class Sections together into one left navigation, with the course becoming an accordion that contains each of its class sections.
Existing system
My redesign
Requirements
Our users greatly desired improvements to the scheduling system that enabled the auto-scheduler to work better. One of those major requests was the ability to have more customization with setting up the requirements for a student to take a course.
Need: The ability to set a minimum required grade from a prerequisite course to take the next level course. The ability to treat prerequisites as a “any of these prerequisites count” versus “all of these prerequisites must have been taken” (current functionality). The ability to set an enrollment priority based on grade level for the auto-scheduler.
Solution: I implemented all of these user requests into my design, plus an additional request from the product manager to add a prerequisite to require a teacher recommendation for a student to take the course.
Conclusion
All of our user testing and early demos have gotten astounding feedback from users. They are extremely excited about major feature changes that we’re implementing, and the ways we will make their jobs much easier.
This is the farthest-reaching phase of our redesign project, as every school has to set up their courses and class sections in our system, even if they don’t use our scheduling software. This redesign — mostly powered by user feedback — will put us much further ahead in the market with our new capabilities.