In an effort to make my scheduler program a bit more usable (in its present form, it’s anything but — command line only, lots of restrictions on input file types), I decided to design a graphical interface for it.  As I worked on it, I had the current student employee managers at my department sit down and click through it. It’s been through several iterations; what you see below is the product of several hours of 1:1 usability interviews.

Primary goals:

1. Provide an intuitive way to import a csv or excel file with worker names and availabilities
2. Allow manual editing of shift details (e.g., time, number of desks)
3. Allow manual tweaking of schedule settings (e.g., don’t schedule double-shifts)
4. Allow manual adding/editing of individual workers
5. Be clear about where the resulting schedule has been saved

If you have Balsamiq Mockups installed on your system, you can download the BMML files here and click through an interactive version.