Overview

As our platform scaled across districts and states, we discovered a consistent source of frustration among school and district administrators: rostering. What should have been a simple setup process—connecting students, teachers, and classes—had become a major time sink.

Our goal was to reimagine rostering so that admins could onboard faster, reduce data errors, and confidently manage updates without relying on technical support.

Role: Lead UX Designer and Manager UX/UI

Problem

Rostering in education is inherently complex—different SIS (Student Information Systems), varying class structures, and mid-year schedule changes all contribute to friction. The time it took for a district admin to fully roster their district each year was 17 days.

Common pain points included:

• Complex workflows requiring too many steps to complete a roster.

• High cognitive load from unclear visibility into staff availability, hours, and conflicts.

• Frequent errors due to manual data entry or version control issues.

• Limited flexibility to make quick adjustments.

• UI was confusing for admins and didn’t tell them quickly if they had what they needed.

Goal

Design a rostering experience that allows admins to:

• Upload bulk teachers and students.

• Be able to see roster quickly and easily.

• Reduce frequent errors due to manual data entry or version control issues.

• Addressed largest pain points for admins within the rostering process.

• Make UI intuitive for the admin.

Research

We conducted user interviews, usability testing, and workflow audits across admins of different sized districts.

Key Insights:

• The biggest rostering frustration was there wasn’t any way to ensure all students were rostered or make changes to students outside of the bulk import for students (no list of students or manual editing to do one off edits).

• Year over year changes were time consuming and hard to do.

• The biggest bulk import frustration was errors that occurred that the system didn’t indicate what was actually wrong with the upload. Admin (and Internal folks) would spend many hours trying to track down error.

• Seeing where warning were and how many licenses needed to still be allocated was extremely helpful.

Collaboration Drives the Solution

• Engaged Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Validated workflows, shared admin pain points, ensured accuracy and compliance.

• Partnered with Product: Defined goals, prioritized features, aligned on trade-offs between simplicity and flexibility.

• Worked closely with Engineering: Explored technical feasibility, designed iterative prototype. Carried designs through agile software development process.

• Outcome: A solution that balanced admin needs, technical constraints, and business objectives.

Solution

We designed Rostering with four core improvements:

1. Smart error handling for bulk import

• Allowed inline updates to bulk import of students so that less errors were thrown.

• Clear error messages for errors that couldn’t be solved inline.

2. Visual conflict indicators in dashboard

• Inline color-coded alerts for over allocated and under allocated licenses.

• Added counts so admin knew exactly who had what.

• Made better distinctions so admin would know who they were looking at and what the teacher/admin/student had.

3. Manual edit ability for student rostering

• Allow admins to make small edits to one/multiple students in list (e.g. move students from one teacher to another)

4. Automate certain functions

• Allow admins to quickly replace a teacher (give all licenses to that teacher and students all go under that new teacher) for situations where a teacher needs to be replaced.

• All admins to quickly replace managing admin without disrupting the student or teacher progress/license allocation (e.g. school IT person changes and needs access to manage all licenses for the school).

Outcome

• Time to create a roster decreased from 17 days to 3 days (reduction in time spent rostering of 82%).

• Time spent editing reduced.

• Customer Success and Implementation calls dropped.