Preparing for the MCAT means working toward a date that doesn’t move: exam day. I designed a Calendar that brings course commitments into one place, so students can see what’s ahead, what they’ve missed and what to focus on next.
Students work toward a target exam date. The dashboard already showed course progress, assignments and live sessions, but in separate sections, with no view of how they fit across days and weeks.
Help students answer: What’s due today? What’s coming this week? What have I missed?
Product designer, end to end, working with a PM and a front-end engineer.
Launched for Live course students. Impact hasn’t been evaluated yet.
01 · The challenge
Students preparing for the MCAT have a target exam date. Along the way, their Live course sets its own instructor-defined deadlines for assignments and live sessions, and keeping track of all of it isn’t always straightforward.
The existing Jack Westin dashboard already brought together course content, assignments and live sessions. But these activities sat in separate sections, without a unified view of how they fit into a student’s day and week.
Picture a student returning after a few days away. The information was all there; the hard part was understanding what needed attention first, what they’d missed, and what was coming next.
The design challengeHow might we organize existing course information into one clear, time-based view?
02 · Understanding the experience
Before deciding what to build, I mapped how the existing dashboard organized each kind of content. Course progress, assignments and live sessions each had their own section, and nothing placed them on a shared timeline of days and weeks.
Before
Separate sections on one page. The student connects them.
After
One source, shown where each question is asked.
Live course students work to fixed, instructor-set deadlines, and missing a class means finding its recording. So the core questions were about time and status: what’s due, what’s late, and what’s next.
With the problem mapped, I looked at how planning tools handle time and tasks together. I benchmarked nine calendar and planning products; four patterns shaped the Calendar concept.
The opportunityStudents needed a connected view of their commitments, not another isolated destination.
03 · Making the decisions
Decision A
Problem
“What do I study today?” and “what’s coming up this week?” need different amounts of detail, which is hard to serve with one fixed layout.
What I decided
Day, Week and Month views over the same schedule, so students zoom in on today or out to the weeks ahead without changing tools.
Trade-off
Three layouts of the same data to keep consistent, including how assignments and sessions show at each zoom level.
Decision B
Problem
A time grid answers “when is class?” but not “what should I work on next?”.
What I decided
Calendar for when, Assignments for what next. Both show the same items and share one completion state, because one screen doing both jobs would have been harder to read.
Trade-off
Two surfaces to keep aligned. Completion status needed to remain consistent across views.
Decision C
Problem
Overdue work was listed by date, but each date was collapsed behind a completion count, and nothing placed it against the week ahead.
What I decided
Overdue shows in three places, each with one job: status on the calendar, an Overdue group at the top of the list, and a dismissible alert.
Trade-off
More red on screen. I used factual, non-judgmental status labels, like “1 day overdue”, to avoid punitive messaging.
Decision D · made with the PM and engineer
Calendars often let people drag items to new dates. But Live course assignments have fixed, instructor-set due dates shared by the whole class, so letting one student move them raised real questions about who owns the date and what stays in sync.
Together with the PM and engineer, we chose to keep V1 focused: students can see their assignments and live sessions in one place and mark work complete, but not reschedule course assignments. More complex capabilities, like rescheduling and integration with external calendars, were outside the original scope and could be explored later.
04 · Bringing the experience together
The Calendar works alongside the course pages students already use. Each decision became part of one flow: see what’s ahead, act on what’s next, and stay connected to the course.
The Week view, with Today’s Tasks and upcoming live sessions beside the grid.
Clicking a day opens its assignments in a panel. Ticking one off updates the alert, the list and the week’s progress together.
A calendar only helps if students find it. Instead of one new destination, I designed several ways in, starting from the pages students already use.
The pop-up appears only the first time a student meets the Calendar on the dashboard, and not again after Explore Calendar. Today’s tasks and the This week card join the dashboard once they’ve explored it, on every screen size.
After students choose Explore Calendar, a four-step tour highlights one part of the page at a time, from the This week card to the calendar grid and Today’s tasks. It runs once and doesn’t appear again.
Students check their schedule on laptops, tablets and phones. The content stays the same; the layout reorders at each size. On desktop (shown above), Today’s tasks and live sessions sit in a sidebar.
05 · Delivery, evaluation & reflection
I designed the Calendar’s Month, Week and Day views, the Assignments view and Day Panel, the overdue states, the entry points from the course dashboard and Learn page, the first-visit introduction, and layouts for desktop, tablet and mobile, working with the PM and front-end engineer, who built it.
The Calendar has launched for Live course students. Its impact hasn’t been evaluated yet, and the screens here are from my final designs, so details of the live product may differ.
Proposed measures to evaluate the experience, not results.
What I learnedPrioritization is part of the design. Working within real product constraints meant deciding what V1 should leave out, and keeping the first release focused on the information students already depended on: what’s due, what’s late and what’s next.