The Availability Schedule feature was designed to enhance transparency between tutors and students by displaying the tutor’s available times directly on their profile page. This schedule allows students to see when tutors will be online for questions or discussions, improving the scheduling of one-on-one interactions. Additionally, a settings page enables tutors to manage their availability manually by setting custom days or opting for an automatic schedule based on their past online activity.

Prior to this feature, students faced difficulty in coordinating with tutors, often unsure of when they would be available. Tutors, on the other hand, needed more control over how their availability was presented without the hassle of frequent manual updates. The challenge was to design a dynamic, user-friendly availability schedule that seamlessly displayed on profiles and gave tutors flexible options to manage their time.

Our research included surveys and interviews with tutors and students to identify pain points in scheduling availability. Students expressed the need for clearer visibility into tutors’ schedules, while tutors wanted a system that minimized manual updates. Insights revealed that while some tutors preferred setting exact times, others favored a system that used their activity history to predict their availability. These findings guided us to design a dual-option system that addressed both needs.

We created personas to represent typical users, such as “Dr. Sara,” a part-time tutor who prefers to set specific times weekly, and “Tom,” a flexible tutor open to automatic scheduling. The personas helped in tailoring the feature to meet diverse scheduling preferences, ensuring the design was adaptable and intuitive for all tutors.

Our design strategy focused on building a responsive, straightforward scheduling interface. Key goals included providing tutors with clear, customizable settings for availability, ensuring students could easily interpret availability on profile pages, and integrating an automatic scheduling option. This strategy emphasized flexibility, clarity, and simplicity to create an efficient experience for both students and tutors.

Tutor can choose between 2 options. Let the system decide based on the hours usually online or put custom dates and hours.

User must quickly see what hours tutor is available at any given day through a graph, text or both.

Testing with tutors revealed that while the majority appreciated the flexibility of setting specific times, many also valued the ease of automatic scheduling. Some initial feedback indicated confusion about switching between manual and automatic modes, so we refined the interface with clearer tooltips and a brief onboarding screen for first-time users. Additional iterations improved the readability of the schedule on profile pages, ensuring students could easily interpret availability at a glance.

The Availability Schedule feature resulted in a 11% increase in scheduled sessions, with students reporting greater confidence in approaching tutors due to the visibility of their available times. Tutors appreciated the efficiency of the automatic scheduling option, and feedback highlighted the value of flexibility and control over their availability. The feature strengthened tutor-student interactions and streamlined scheduling, fostering a more effective learning environment.