Administrators had no way to track scheduling progress in real time
Spektrum Akademie is a vocational education institution in Berlin, training students across Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Speech Therapy and Early Childhood Education. I designed the real-time scheduling and resource-tracking system its administrators now plan every semester around.
Spektrum Akademie's current system couldn't track real-time progress of key academic resources: class schedules, teacher hours, subject completion and internship requirements.
This forced administrators and educators to estimate progress retrospectively, leaving gaps in planning and resource allocation.
Interviewed administrators to map their day-to-day process, explored the strategy in mind maps and user flows with the product and dev teams, then benchmarked wireframes before designing the full scheduler.
A real-time tracking and scheduling system integrated with Spektrum Akademie's legacy platform, cutting manual tracking effort by 90% and speeding up timetable creation by 75%.
Understanding the problem
We conducted in-depth interviews with administrators to dive into their day-to-day processes and uncover the limitations of the current system.
To bring these insights to life, we crafted short stories depicting the real struggles administrators faced, surfacing the key user journeys behind the eventual design.
Turning insights into a strategy
Mapping hours: aligning target and completed hours with resources to accurately track progress and enable informed decisions.
Resource categorization: introducing categories and tags to streamline the scheduling process.
Consistent naming conventions: ensuring terminology stayed consistent to enable smooth data import/export with the legacy system.
User flow for idea implementation
To ensure the solution aligned with the legacy system, technical constraints and enhanced usability, we collaborated closely with the product manager, development team and stakeholders, thoroughly assessing the proposed approach and its impact.
Key insights
Flexible data manipulation: the ability to adjust data for new functionality while maintaining consistency with the legacy system.
Seamless legacy integration: streamlined import/export keeps systems synchronized, reducing manual work and errors.
Data overload: handling large datasets can be overwhelming, requiring extra development time and effort.
Terminology consistency: inconsistent formatting or terminology can disrupt integration and cause errors.
“We benchmarked this initial solution to ensure its viability, and it provided the foundation to proceed with designing the overall user journey.”
From wireframe to working scheduler, in three rounds
Putting ideas through wireframes
The product manager facilitated review discussions with the client while I observed to ensure alignment with stakeholder expectations. We gathered and annotated feedback directly on the wireframes, letting us iterate before moving forward and build interchangeable steps for class, subject, teacher and room selection.
Moderated prototype testing, built on iteration 1 feedback
Scheduler
We tested a calendar view for scheduling classes, annotated below with the dropdown selectors for class, subject, teacher and room.
“It's very difficult to view subjects scheduled by period.”
“Switching between classes to schedule subjects is cumbersome. Can I see all the semester's classes together?”
Dashboard
We tested a class dashboard summarizing scheduled hours and subject progress, with a drill-down panel showing each teacher's contribution and hours taught per subject.
Users praised the analytics, the granularity of the data, and how easily they could see hours taught by teachers.
Moderated prototype testing: the improved period view
Based on that feedback, we redesigned around a period view that lists every class per row across the week, with a “Schedule Class” panel for assigning subject, teacher, room and duration, closer to the familiar Google Calendar layout and built to support recurring subject scheduling.
It made scanning the scheduled periods much more intuitive and significantly simplified the process of scheduling classes and internships.
Designed a real-time tracking and scheduling system that integrates with Spektrum Akademie's legacy platform.
Administrators can now monitor class schedules, teacher hours, internships and subject progress, while the advanced timetable scheduler enables efficient planning for upcoming semesters, reducing manual tracking and improving resource management.
Automated tracking replaced spreadsheets, saving significant administrative time.
The intuitive interface speeds up timetable creation, allowing for more efficient planning.
We calculated this impact by recording baseline metrics during discovery interviews and comparing them with feedback and performance metrics gathered in follow-up interviews after the product entered daily use.
“Diese Software hat unsere Stundenplanung revolutioniert. Wir sparen nicht nur Zeit, sondern haben auch einen viel besseren Überblick über unsere Ressourcen.”
— Spektrum Akademie