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- Once a user has selected a mode, it is very quick for him/her to select different shifts within that mode.
- We could have an option at the top to select all shifts for a particular day
- Users can see their entire schedules in one view and can easily know what days of the week their shifts are on
- An admin can approve an instructors instructor's entire schedule at once.
Cons:
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All of Sam’s shifts are approved and Sam realizes that he can instruct children one Sunday that needs more instructors. He logs back into the website and submits a request to have that shift added to his schedule.
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Darryl sees that Sam has submitted a request and approves his schedule change.
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- This design aims for simplicity, utilizing drop-down menus for discipline/shift/date selection, and buttons to submit selections. Thus, the user is not bogged down by any modes or complicated interfaces.
- The screen to view one's schedule is very similar to what exists now (a simple listing of the instructor's schedule, with one line per shift), so the interface to view and manage their own schedule is consistent with what they're used to.
- There is a lot of repeated functionality between screens, so providing internal consistency such that the users will not have to acclamate to too many different interfaces.
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- It does not take advantage of the natural tendency to use calendars to represent schedules, losing out on an opportunity for external consistency.
Efficiency
Pros:
- The manage attendance page might not make it clear that the admin has to hit Submit for the changes to actually take effect.
Efficiency
Pros:
- To select the same To select the same discipline/shift/day-of-the-week combination for every week is very quick – it requires only 7 button presses, as opposed to one click per shift.
- The interface to add a shift is very clean; an instructor doesn't have to search through his/her current schedule to be sure to click the right icon, but instead follows the same simple selection procedure as when he/she created the schedule in the first place.
- An admin can approve an entire instructor's schedule at once.
Cons:
- Because this interface is heavily text-based, it does not provide the ease of efficiency granted by seeing schedules in a calendar-based layout.
- In order to select only every other Friday, for example, the instructor must select every single shift separately, or select "Friday (all)" and then remove every unwanted Friday from the list.
- There is no way to know that a discipline/shift/date combination is invalid until the user tries to add it and the add fails.
- Admins cannot see the already-approved schedules from the Approve Shifts page, so it is unclear which shifts actually need more instructors.
Safety
Pros:
- When submitting a shift, the user must not only enter the desired shifts, but then click Submit Schedule for Approval before the schedule is submitted.
- When rejecting shifts, the admin gets prompted with an "Are you sure?" dialog to avoid accidentally rejecting shifts.
- When an instructor requests a schedule change, it is displayed on his/her schedule page in an "Unapproved Changes" section, to make it clear what the result of the action was in case it needs to be undone.
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- Instructors can't modify each other's schedules.
- Changes require admin approval.
Cons:
- Admins might approve too many or too few instructors for a given shift, since the approval display doesn't tell who is already approved for that shift.
- There is no undo option - instead, a user has to find the trash icon or checkbox to remove an incorrectly-added shift.