Challenge

Currently, Mackenzie University has over 1,000 faculty members across more than 100 courses, serving over 49,000 students. In addition to teaching, faculty members handle administrative tasks such as coordination, event organization, and other responsibilities that consume their available time each week. At the start of the academic year, one can imagine the amount of information that administrators and course coordinators must manage to create class schedules, negotiate professors' availability, offer courses, and secure classrooms for these more than 1,000 professors, each with their own specific needs.

The Mackenzie software development team, coordinated by a professor from the Faculty of Computing and Informatics and led by the Pro-Rector of Planning and Administration (PRPA), is driving innovation within the university. They are creating a system capable of managing all faculty activities within Mackenzie in a unified way, bringing about fully digital management and data updates almost instantly compared to the paper-based processes that still exist in many situations.

The challenge in this scenario is to create a layout concept that, in addition to being intuitive, respects the institution's tradition and innovation, providing usability to handle all this complexity and anticipating new future situations. Therefore, we created a flexible and durable layout for the system, taking into account the user journey, the experience they will have, and the ease of visualizing the overall picture, allowing for more precise and faster decision-making.

Transformation_

The partnership between Evo Systems and Mackenzie has enabled those in charge to plan the relationship between teachers, classes, and venue location quickly and clearly, taking into account the factors of each and allowing for a clear visualization of possibilities and inconsistencies.

We started the project by creating wireframes, which are sketches of how the system would work. This allowed us to analyze functionality and usability and improved the user experience by generating a schedule simulation. In this first phase, the focus is on collecting all the necessary information and analyzing how each piece of information will influence the system, as well as defining priorities and facilitations.

After the wireframing process, we were able to decide how to design the layout so that all the necessary information would appear on the screen, such as viewing a teacher's entire week. In addition, we also discovered the need for a filter to identify possible inconsistencies in the generated schedule, which makes it easier for the coordinator to rearrange teachers, locations, or classes.

Furthermore, the entire design utilized the style guide previously created by Evo Systems for the Mackenzie Portal. Each portal module uses a representative color, and as we can see in the images below, the representative color for Timetabling – the name given to the scheduling system – is pink.

By accessing the timetabling feature, the user can simulate a schedule and thus gain access to the table. In the class view, it is possible to filter by campus, unit, type, course, modality, and class schedule, or inconsistencies. The view shows the entire week for each class at a given time, providing details on the number of students, subject, course, location, and instructor. Furthermore, the system highlights any inconsistencies that may have been generated, such as insufficient schedule availability to cover the component's workload, for example.

In the faculty view, the table can be filtered by campus, unit, type, modality, course, faculty contract status, inconsistencies, and/or schedule. The table provides an overview of each faculty member, showing their contract status, number of available hours, schedules, classes, inconsistencies, course, subject, number of students in each class, available time, preferred time, alternative time, and blocked time, and allows for schedule changes.

Tools

• UX/UI Design