CMUCal
A calendar management system for CMU students that aims to aggregate educational and career resources into a central platform. CMUCal helps CMU students discover campus events, organize recurring commitments, and manage everything alongside Google Calendar.
TIMELINE
Ongoing
TEAM
1 PM
3 Engineers
3 Designers
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
FOCUS
User Research
Product Design
Design-Eng Collaboration
THE PROBLEM
A disjointed ecosystem for student events
At CMU, students constantly switch between Canvas, emails, Discord, spreadsheets, posters, and Google Calendar to keep track of lectures, office hours, club meetings, and career events.
There wasn’t a single place to organize everything together.
RESEARCH
Understanding how students manage campus life
Through interviews, we found that students weren’t struggling with lack of information; they were struggling with too much information across disconnected systems.
Cognitive overload
Students constantly rebuild schedules manually across different platforms.
Missed opportunities
One-time events disappeared across Slack, email, flyers, and Handshake.
No personalization
Existing tools didn't reflect each student's unique semester commitments.
GOAL
Reimagine how students discover, organize, and revisit campus events, all in one place.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
A unified platform for both planning and discovery
CMUCal helps students manage both recurring commitments and one-time opportunities in a single experience. It combines personalized schedules, event discovery, community-contributed content, and smooth Google Calendar integration, transforming fragmented campus information into a centralized hub for navigating student life.
PROCESS
Iterating from CMUCal v1 to v2
View v1 case study
Our first version centralized events across 3 categories: Academics, Clubs, and Careers. The system treated every event, lectures, office hours, club meetings, as individual cards. But as we scaled and tested with more students, the limitations in how content was organized and navigated became clear.
What didn't work in v1:
Lack of semantic structure
No way to group related recurring events into meaningful bundles.
Difficult information architecture
Categories didn’t match students’ mental models.
Lack of ownership
Users couldn't build a semester around themselves.
KEY DESIGN SHIFTS
From event-centric → schedule-centric
CMUCal v1 treated every single occurrence as an individual event. In v2, we introduced a more structured model that distinguishes between Schedules (recurring, structured commitments) and Events (one-time, exploratory happenings). This change better supports how students mentally organize their time.
We also replaced the generic search page with a personalized Profile/Home page—a semester-specific dashboard that centralizes user’s enrolled schedules and relevant events.
There is an integrated edit mode that allows users to personalize their semester dashboard by adding or removing these bundles without leaving the page, making semester setup fast and flexible.
Upload system
A core goal of CMUCal is community contribution: schedules and events are created not only by course/club admins, but also by individual students who surface one-time events they care about.
In early explorations, I considered a freeform upload box to support fast captureI. However, this approach raised some concerns:
Incomplete information
Submissions often lacked important metadata.
Inconsistent formatting
Different contributors described similar events in different ways.
To improve consistency and trust, I introduced a structured input form that guided contributors through required fields while still supporting quick event creation.
FINAL DESIGN
A personalized semester dashboard
The Home page acts as a student’s personal scheduling hub. Recurring commitments like classes and club meetings are bundled into editable schedule blocks, making it easier to manage semester planning at a glance.
Explore one-time events
A dedicated Explore view surfaces events students may want to attend outside their recurring commitments: career fairs, guest lectures, performances, and hackathons.
Community-powered upload
Students and organizations can upload events through a structured submission flow or by linking public Google Calendars. This balances flexibility with consistency while keeping the platform scalable.
Admin dashboard
For course staff and student organizations, CMUCal includes an admin dashboard for managing calendars, event sources, and published events. This helps reduce maintenance friction while improving event reliability across the platform.
NEXT STEPS
Preparing for launch
CMUCal v2 is currently moving toward development and launch. I continue supporting the engineering team through design documentation, detailed specs, and edge-case thinking as the platform evolves.
REFLECTIONS
What I learned
Designing systems, not screens
The challenge wasn't interface design, but to create a model that matched students' mental models.
Iteration matters
The most important decisions emerged after testing v1 and identifying structural flaws.
Cross-functional collaboration
I worked closely with engineers to translate complex scheduling logic into scalable product behaviors.