Designing a scheduling system — a UX Case Study (2024)

Hello! My name is Mahdi Farra, I’m a product design lead at CollegeVine.

At Collegevine, we help high school students with their college admissions by providing them with virtual guidance and mentorship.

We currently employ over 600 college and grad students to work with us as consultants, mentors, and tutors to help high school students with their college admissions process.

To give you a little more context, these are the types of users we have:

1: High school students (Collegevine’s clients) are often stressed at the time leading up to submitting school applications due to the complexity and sensitivity of the admission process.

2: Our college consultants, on the other hand, are usually organized and should be able to plan how their days will be shaped.

3: Parents, we ask them as well as the student a few questions to collect their preferences. We then pair their child (high school student) with one of our consultants who match as many of their preferences as possible.

Most of our programs require regular meetings (usually weekly) and video calls between our clients and consultants to be able to communicate and navigate through their program.

In the past, if one of our clients (let’s call her Rachel) wanted to schedule a time to call their consultant (Jane), they both had to send a few emails back and forth with to decide on a time to meet.

Scheduling a session this way was taking a lot of time from both Rachel (student) and Jane (consultant). Occasionally, Rachel would forget about her session. Jane had to remind her via email/call, knowing that they had to meet regularly in order to finish their program on time.

Sometimes, Jane was late to reply to Rachel, which harms the client-consultant relationship. This translated into more stress for Rachel.

Meeting scheduling issues also strained the consultant-parent relationship.

What's even worse, Rachel and Jane have to go through this whole process over and over again every time they want to schedule a session (in most of our programs the student and the consultant have to meet at least once a week)!

1: Scheduling a session with a CollegeVine consultant wasn’t an easy job; it took a lot of time, and it stressed everyone out.

2: Platform analytics: how are our consultants meeting? When are they meeting?

3: Availability analytics: when are people available? Do we have a low point in availability?

4: Entry point for on-platform video chat: we want video chat on platform, so we need sessions in place to allow that.

They’re our customers and our most important user group. And according to the data collected from our consultants, our students are usually unorganized and don’t maintain a calendar.

College & Grad Students, age 19+

Based on the behavioral data we collected over the past 5 years, we found that they’re usually well organized and have flexibility in scheduling. However, they are constrained by the quantity of time available due to classes, homework, and their work with CollegeVine.

High school students will likely use their laptop to schedule a session with their consultants (over 85% of our clients uses desktop according to our analytics). They might schedule the session at school or home. If they do it at school, they probably won’t have a lot of time to do it, and if they do it at home, they’ll probably have more time.

Consultants (college students specifically because they’re the majority) usually use their laptop as well (more than 90%), and they manage their schedules in different places: a library, a dorm room, and a coffee shop. They usually have limited time to manage their schedules because they have to study, work, and complete their homework for college.

What informed our solution?

Let’s go back a little bit to our story of the high school student Rachel and her consultant Jane who used to get stressed and waste a lot of time scheduling a session. We thought that maybe we should ask Rachel and Jane to tell each other when they’re going to be available ahead of time and let them schedule a session with each other according to that.

We had that built out in the past, and it wasn’t working well: the consultants weren’t marking their availability, and if they did, they frequently forgot about it.

Our high school students almost never marked their availability, and when they wanted to schedule a session, they never checked their consultant’s availability. Instead, they went ahead and sent them an email asking them when they could meet.

We also learned that our consultants (compared to our clients in high school) are more responsible and have a better awareness of their own schedule. We decided to continue letting them mark their availability in our system but with a few added features such as allowing them to connect their Google calendar (used by ~96% of our consultants) to prevent double bookings.

And on the other hand, we let the high school students decide when to meet with their consultants based on their availability.

To go back to our story; Jane would connect her Google calendar to CollegeVine’s sessions scheduling system and then she’d mark her availability.

This is how Jane (Consultant) would mark her availability

She’ll first navigate to our sessions dashboard, and then she’d click and drag anywhere in this calendar interface to mark her availability.

This image has all the different states for adding/editing/deleting availabilities.

This is how Rachel (Client) would book a session with Jane

Step 1 — Choosing the consultant she wants to schedule a session with

• 80%+ of consultants marked their availability.
• 70%+ of clients used the system to book their sessions.
• Decreased the number of support tickets opened by Consultants and Students to less than five tickets a day.

The solution, of course, had a lot of interesting iterations. Here are a few hand-picked examples of things we learned after performing usability tests and launching the product.

1. Time zones

In our sessions scheduling system, we show a summary of upcoming sessions. Since we have students across the country using CollegeVine, we need to pay particular attention to a user’s time zone to prevent scheduling confusion.

We completed a series of usability tests to get the right format for displaying the session start time. We learned the following:

• Most of our students do not know their current time zone.
• Many consultants assumed the session start time was by default in their student’s time zone.
• Using friendly, obvious language (“Your time”) solved the issue for all our users!

2. Choosing an available day for a session

We tested two versions of the page where the client would pick a day to schedule a session with their Consultant. In the first version (left image), we showed only the days that have availabilities, and in the second version (right image) we displayed all days, even the ones without any availability.

We tested the first version on eight users by asking them to use a prototype prepared in InVision app to book a session with one of our consultants on a specific day. Six of them got really confused when they were choosing a day for their session because some of the days of that week were missing!

The other two users that were able to book a session, chose another day than the one they thought (Jul 22 instead of Jul 21).

After that, of course, we decided to use the design on the right because it was easier to find an availability on a specific day of the week on it.

3. Minimum session scheduling notice

A few days after we launched our sessions system, we started receiving a lot of emails from our consultants complaining about how some of their clients were scheduling a session with them with a very short notice, in some cases less than 2 hours.

We quickly released a hot-fix to solve that by allowing clients to schedule a session in at least 24 hours in advance, and then after that, we added a setting to enable our consultants to change the minimum scheduling notice.

4. Consultants who haven’t marked their availability

The adoption rate for our sessions booking system wasn’t the fastest; it took some time for them to start using our system to mark their availability and rely on it to organize their sessions. And on the other hand, the adoption rate from our clients was of course higher, because they didn’t have to do anything in advance to use the system.

Because most of our consultants weren’t using the system to mark their availability we had to figure out a way to allow our clients to continue using our system to schedule a session with their consultant at any time they’d like to.

To allow clients to book a session with consultants without any availability we modified the part of booking a session where a client would choose the session’s time. Instead of showing them the available times (left image), we allowed them to type in the exact time (right image) they’d like to have the session on.

Another issue we discovered, is that all booked sessions by default are auto-accepted (right image) from the consultant side because we were assuming they’ll mark their availability in our system, and an availability should mean they’re really available.

That had to be slightly different for consultants who didn’t mark their availability in our system; we made allowed to manually accept/decline session requests (left image) from their clients.

5. Measuring the client’s satisfaction and consultants’ performance

To understand how satisfied our clients are with their sessions, we decided to send them a concise survey right after the end of each session (left image), in which they’d have to click on a happy/sad face, and after that we’d take them to a page where they could leave more feedback about the session if they’d like to.

And on the consultants’ side (right image), we decided to send them a more detailed survey, in which we’d ask them a few questions about how the client was performing.

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