Mobile app for academicplanning.

Users

All students of the academy. Group leaders have a special role: they enter and maintain information for their classmates, so their experience matters as much as everyone else’s.

My role

Designer in a team of two designers and a PM. We worked through the whole process together and split tasks almost equally: interviews, journey mapping, UX, UI, prototypes, testing and the UI Kit.

Challenge

Carry out an in-depth study of the target audience, so the app can focus on real student needs and become a fast, reliable assistant at every stage of learning.

Goals

• Put all the information a student needs into one app that is quick and easy to use.
• Make it simple for group leaders to keep that information up to date.
• Success criteria: task success rate, user satisfaction and qualitative feedback, so the app is easy to use, satisfying and aligned with what students need.

Research

We interviewed ten people: students and group leaders. The interviews covered how they keep track of schedules, deadlines and information today, and what gets in the way. From these conversations we built a user journey map to see where the experience breaks down.

Insights and journey map

The journey map showed that the biggest pain points come toward the end of the semester. Two insights shaped the app:

• Students struggle to plan their workload because they cannot see the bigger picture of their week or semester.
• They want quick access to the essentials, not long lists to dig through.

From insights to decisions

1. A home screen built around what matters now.

   The hardest question was what the home screen should show first: the schedule or the tasks. Since students need quick access to the essentials, we put the schedule up front, showing today and the days ahead.

2. Reminders for deadlines and changes.

   Because the pressure peaks at the end of the semester, the app reminds students about deadlines and schedule changes, so they don’t have to remember or ask.

3. A to-do list that stays simple.

   Tasks live in a to-do list that was simplified after testing, so it supports planning without becoming one more thing to manage.

Prototyping and testing

We tested the prototype in five rounds with students. Two things changed as a result: we reworked the logic of the main menu, and we made the to-do list simpler. Both changes came directly from watching where people hesitated.

Solution

The app brings the schedule, course planning and task details into one place, with the schedule on the home screen and reminders for deadlines and changes. A UI Kit of basic components keeps the interface consistent.

Outcome

In three months we delivered a tested prototype of the app and a UI Kit, backed by ten interviews, a user journey map and five rounds of usability testing. The result puts all the information students need in one place, quickly and accessibly.