Time4Tables
A timetable web app concept for Indian schools that helps principals build timetables, assign substitute teachers, and keep workload fair, with the human always in charge.
UI/UX
SaaS
Role
[TBD]
Timeline
3 weeks
team
Saptarshi, Shubhankar, Harshal, Govardhan · Guided by Prof. Anirudha Joshi
platform
Web
What this is for
Every school runs on its timetable: which teacher takes which class, in which room, in which period. In many Indian schools it is still made by hand. Principals and coordinators sketch on template paper and in diaries, juggle government rules on teaching hours, teacher preferences and room limits, and start again whenever a teacher leaves. As one teacher said, “The timetable keeps changing, teachers leave for better jobs, so we have to revise it again and again.” When someone is absent, colleagues lose their free periods to cover: “3 rest periods on paper often become just 1.”
Time4Tables is a product design concept for this problem. It’s a timetable web app, plus phone widgets, that helps a school build its timetable, allocate substitute (proxy) teachers, and balance workload.
Process: Brief → Define → Design, in three weeks
Over three weeks, the work moved through three phases.
Understand. The team ran contextual inquiries across 19 schools using Clarke & Brown’s framework. They interviewed principals, teachers and admin staff, studied paper timetables and diaries, and built cultural, artefact and flow work models.
Define. More than 1,100 sticky notes from the interview interpretations were grouped into 30 themes. User goals were set with Prof. Anirudha Joshi’s Usability Goal Setting Tool, and three personas (a principal, a teacher and an office-staff assistant) led to a revised brief: “An intuitive timetable app that boosts productivity by combining algorithmic scheduling with a guided manual mode, smart suggestions, and easy substitution management.”
Design and evaluate. The team worked out a conceptual model with hard and soft constraint layers, then the information architecture, wireframes and visual identity. Paper sketches (Version 0) became Version 1.0, then a prototype coded with Cursor and Figma MCP and tested with teachers. The findings fed into Version 2.0.
Set up your school in plain English
Onboarding has four steps: set the school’s working hours and days, add spaces (rooms, labs, grounds), profile the faculty, then define the rules. Rules can be typed in plain English, like ‘No classes for Prof. Smith on Friday mornings’, and AI turns them into scheduling constraints. Schools can also import an existing timetable to get started.
From there the user chooses Generate draft or Assign Manually. Manual mode is guided: pick the day, teacher and subject, with tooltips if you’re unsure. It is also error-proof, so you can’t assign a period where it isn’t logically possible. If you’d rather not, “Lazy? Just auto allocate.”
Substitution, fair workload, and three views
Proxy allocation handles the daily problem of absent teachers. The absentee list can come in automatically from ERP plugins or biometric attendance. All possible substitutes for a period are shown, with visual cues, and proxies can be auto-allocated or assigned manually row by row.
Workload becomes visible. A Comprehensive Workload Score adds up proxy teaching hours, administrative burden, academic teaching load and special duties, each weighted for complexity and recency. Relative Workload % (individual score ÷ lowest score × 100) flags teachers who are “Overloaded, needs attention.”
Testers asked for a room-wise view, and Version 2.0 offers teacher-wise, class-wise and room-wise timetables. It also has a calendar that syncs with Google or Notion, and phone widgets that show a teacher’s next period and substitution alerts.
The challenge
The brief: “Indian schools struggle with inefficient and error-prone timetable creation, necessitating a streamlined solution for accurate and optimized scheduling.”
Simply automating it doesn’t work. Every school has its own unwritten rules, and the people who make timetables don’t trust a machine to know them. The primary persona, Principal Madhav Mohite, puts it bluntly: “I am telling you, an AI made timetable would fail, how can it understand my school requirements, even i can’t describe some of them clearly myself.” Research turned this into two principles: Copilot >> Autopilot, so the human oversees every slot, and Rules need exceptions, because a rigid system will fail.
Status (honest)
Time4Tables is a concept with a working prototype, not a shipped product. The team coded and hosted the prototype, then shared it with 4 teachers they had interviewed earlier, running think-aloud sessions on two tasks: assigning periods to teachers and assigning proxies for absent teachers. SUS, task time, error rate, satisfaction and NASA-TLX were planned, but no results were published, so there are no outcome metrics to report.
The feedback that came back was qualitative. Proxy allocation landed well (“Proxy Allocation is Good”), but onboarding felt too long. Some testers found the look too playful because they were used to Excel- or Word-style tools. Others asked for week-wise schedules, exam timetables and a room-wise view, and wanted to know how the workload % was calculated. These insights shaped Version 2.0.
Project by Saptarshi, Shubhankar, Harshal and Govardhan, guided by Prof. Anirudha Joshi.
