This design for creating a four-year plan offers students a fast and easy way to create their four-year plan. On the right hand side, students would see the requirements along with a number stating how many still have to be fulfilled; this allows the user to know how his four-year plan matches up with the requirements needed for graduation such as the GIRs and his Major requirements.  As Ben Bitdiddle starts, he can first fill the chart with his first-year classes; for ease, he can search for the classes he has taken and add them to his plan by drag and drop to the semester he wishes.  As he does this, the requirement information will change showing Bitdiddle the requirements that he may have partially fulfilled, but it would also show him what requirements he still has to fulfill.  He can then continue with the classes he is interested in taking; as he does, the planner will take the course availability (fall vs. spring) and prerequisites into consideration so that Bitdiddle can know what classes are available per semester and in what order he should take them.

As Ben Bitdiddle attempts to make his four-year plan, he first decides he wants to make his schedule for the upcoming semester then map out the rest of his plan.  He double-clicks on the current semester, Sophomore Fall, and the schedule appears.  It pre-fills with whatever he added in the four-year plan, and he can further develop it.  From this view, he can then see how they will fill up his weekly calendar.  He then notices a conflict between two classes; he is undecided on which one he wants to take.  He is then able to click on the class and see other friends who have shared their calendars with him and see what they are taking.  He looks at the two classes and sees that two of his best friends are taking 6.005 and chooses to take that over 6.006.

After having a rough sketch of his classes for that semester, Ben Bitdiddle wants to see how his classes matches up with his friends.  He clicks on his friend Noel Morales and then sees his classes, which have already been shared with him.  He gazes at it and sees that they have two classes in common; yes!, he'll have a study buddy for two classes.  Last he checks his second best friend Ruby Tamberino, and sees she has one HASS class that sounds really interesting.  Ben Bitdiddle then returns to his schedule and makes the change.  After developing a schedule for this semester that he is happy with, he continues on and completes his four-year plan that he is happy with.  Lastly, he wants to share his schedule with his associate advisor to make sure it seems reasonable.

In this design, the day-and-time schedule for Ben's current semester is displayed on the left hand side of a notebook-like layout. In order to add a course to the schedule he drags and drops it from the list of suggested courses on the right hand side. If he wants to learn more about the course before he adds it, he clicks on the course and a drop-down window appears with info such as the professor teaching the class, prerequisite courses, and the day(s) and time(s) offered. Lectures will be locked in because there is no opportunity for student choice here, but there will be when it comes to recitation sections. So when Ben initially adds a course the app will automatically select the recitation for him that fits in his earliest available time slot, but if he hovers over that section in the schedule his other options for the recitation will appear (with lower opacity than the already-scheduled blocks) on the planner.