Building a fusion of functionality and effortless User Experience
Visit WebsiteBITS Pilani is among the very few universities in India where students are allowed to make their own timetable. Although the freedom to choose classes exists, this also brings along a lot of hurdles in the overall experience of creating a schedule.
The STUDENTS’ UNION TECHNICAL TEAM decided to develop a multi platform solution with the simplest hassle-free possible UX to simplify the process of timetable making. The application is available as a web app, on android and iOS. We aimed at achieving a combination of performance, minimalism and an inuitive user experience, the latter being the most important as that was one of the major features that had been missing from any application/website developed on campus before. Features like sharing/importing the timetable, notes/reminders and sleep alarms were also included so that the students never miss on anything.
Searching for courses & adding classes was the primary & most important function of the application. Simple and clean cards were created for each course with relevant information like lectures, tutorials etc. Accordion type drop downs were used for further choosing sections for lectures and tutorial classes.
Searching for courses & adding classes was the primary & most important function of the application. Simple and clean cards were created for each course with relevant information like lectures, tutorials etc. Accordion type drop downs were used for further choosing sections for lectures and tutorial classes.
A very unique feature was sharing timetables with your peers using a temporary key that gets generated & the other user imports a timetable using someone’s key. Students often want to refer to how others are making their schedule to get a better perspective for their own timetable. Hence, the sharing feature was a new area that we wanted to explore.
Another query we noticed in user interviews was regarding often forgetting to bring some specified textual material to class the next day. To tackle this, we came up with a notes & reminders feature to allow users to set reminders & even attach E-books along! The screen to add a new reminder comprised of entering the basic details like date, time & title and a simple toggle button to switch notifications along with a button to attach files.
During research another interesting fact that we found out was that more than 60% of people missed their classes due to oversleeping. So, we decided to introduce an alarms feature but it had to be a litte different than a standard alarm on your phone. We included an option to select the amount of time before each class before which the alarm should ring. Adding an alarm, modifying time were other sub-functionalities on this screen.