Yes, you’ve probably all noticed that Scheedule, the popular Illinois class scheduling website, now has an option to use “schedule builder” – which is the way Illinexus Scheduler used to work.
We decided to ask Scheedule co-founder Suraj Samaranayake a few questions to get the full scoop on what they’re all about:
The Quad: How was Scheedule born?
Suraj: Mike Barker came up with the original idea for Scheedule. We were starting Sophmore year in college and we were all frustrated with how long and painful the process was for scheduling classes. Mike had the idea with presenting students with all the possible schedules, and then let them pick which one they like best. From there, he brought the idea to myself along with Matt Strick and Dave Alongi and we ended up doing the project as a part of SIGSoft (special interest group in software engineering). Scheedule debuted at EOH 2006 with about 10 of us working on it.
The Quad: How many people work on the project now?
Suraj: There are currently 6 people who work on the project now and all 6 were founders: Suraj Samaranayake, Mike Barker, Dave Alongi, Matt Strick, Greg Schechter, Will Duff
Myself along with Dave and Mike graduated in May 2008. After this May, all of us will have graduated thou we will still keep working on the project.
The Quad: What were some of your biggest challenges in creating Scheedule?
Suraj: Creating Scheedule and having it be successful had many hard challenges. First were the technical challenges. Collecting and sorting all the necessary class information was very challenging. The school does not publish the logic that pairs discussions and labs with lectures, so we had to create our own set of rules to create these combinations. Ensuring that every schedule we provide the user is valid is very hard with the number of classes that the University of Illinoisoffers.
Second was making the tool as simple to use as possible. We’re all big supporters of simplicity, and we tried to show that in the design. Some class combinations can have 10,000+ possible schedules, and no user wants to go through every one. We had to design smart to allow the user to find their perfect schedule with as little hassle as possible.
Lastly was marketing Scheedule to the students. None of us were marketing majors, so building up our user base has always been a challenge to use. Our first semester we had around 5,000 users and since then we’ve tripled in size.
The Quad: What is your ultimate vision for Scheedule?
Suraj: Our core goal has stayed the same: to provide students a tool to make their lives a little easier and to save them some time. Our original feature set allowed students to find their perfect schedule. Now with our new books feature, we also make the book buying process easier, providing students the list of books needed for their classes and a link to save money by buying them off amazon.com. Buying books online has always been a cheaper alternative for students, however it has always been a hassle to find out what books they need to buy, and find the correct version of the book online. With our new book buying feature, we hope to solve that problem.
The Quad: Do you hope to get Scheedule on every college campus?
Suraj: Thats always been a goal of ours, however we’ve concentrated on making the product as useful as it can be to UofI students first. Once we’re comfortable with the features we provide, we’ll consider expanding to other campuses.
The Quad: You recently added the “Scheduler Builder” (IlliNexus-style) functionality to Scheedule. Why did you decide to do this? Has it been popular in its first few weeks?
Suraj: It wasn’t until recently that someone on the team told us that IlliNexus had shut down. They’ve been a popular tool to students since before Scheedule. Both products helped students find the right schedule but solved the problem in two completely different ways. Some students liked the auto-generation of schedules, while others liked building the schedule themselves. When IlliNexus shut down, we decided to give their users a way to use “IlliniNexus style scheduling” on Scheedule. We looked into combining some of their functionality with our existing schedule generator, however adding it as a separate feature just ended up making more sense. It has been popular since we launched it, however we haven’t really advertised that we added their functionality to our site.
