Revisiting a meeting room scheduling app I first designed during a UX/UI internship at NewTec Solutions. What started as a simple tool for booking rooms and checking availability has been redesigned with smoother user flows, a clearer interface, and a more polished visual design ✨

Background

Revisiting my first project

During my final year of studies, I joined NewTec Solutions as a UX/UI Design Intern. For four months, I worked alongside senior designers, project managers, developers, and QA testers, contributing to various tasks across design, development, and testing.

I learned how to apply design processes in a real-world environment and gained a solid understanding of HTML and CSS principles. In addition to my main projects, I was involved in several smaller design assignments, which helped me explore different aspects of UX and UI design.

The Challenge

One of my key projects was the Meeting Room Scheduling App, a tablet-based tool for employees and managers to check room availability and schedule meetings. The goal was to create a simple, functional application that could later be expanded with more advanced scheduling features or adapted for B2B use.

At the time, my supervisors were pleased with the outcome. However, after a few years of professional experience, I saw an opportunity to improve it. I decided to revisit the project to refine the user flow, make the interface more intuitive, and bring the visual design to a higher standard.

During my internship, my first task was to understand how meeting room scheduling apps are typically designed and used. I began with a competitive audit, analyzing similar tools to learn how they display availability, manage bookings, and optimize the user experience. Once I had a clearer understanding of common patterns and pain points, we held a brainstorming session.

These sessions took place several times during the project. The first one focused on identifying user needs. With input from three senior designers and a product manager, we outlined key expectations and frustrations of employees relying on scheduling tools for daily tasks.

📍 The app’s original goal was straightforward: allow employees and managers to quickly check room availability and book meeting spaces.

To challenge and refine the design, I asked a series of “what if” questions to uncover edge cases and usability concerns:

• What if a user needs to schedule a meeting in under 30 seconds?
• What if a meeting room gets double-booked?
• What if someone needs to see all available rooms at a glance?
• What if a meeting runs overtime?
• What if a user needs to schedule multiple meetings in one session?
• What if the scheduling process needs to be accessible from shared tablets without individual logins?

Also, one of the biggest issues I identified was the availability bar, a UI element meant to simplify bookings but which often caused confusion.

Through this redesign, I realized that usability matters more than novelty. The solution should be intuitive and easy to navigate, not reinvent familiar patterns that already work. From this analysis, several improvement opportunities emerged:

• Replacing the confusing availability bar with a button that opens a clear calendar view (similar to Google Calendar)
• Modernizing the overall UI for improved readability and ease of use
• Defining a scalable approach for future feature expansion, such as B2B use cases

‍These insights shaped the redesign’s focus: streamlining key actions, improving visibility of information, and adding smart features to simplify daily use.

Employees need a fast, intuitive way to check meeting room availability and schedule meetings without unnecessary steps or confusion.

User Goals & Needs

• Book a meeting room quickly, ideally in under 30 seconds
• Instantly see available time slots
• Avoid double-booking conflicts
• Schedule multiple meetings without repeating the entire process
• Access the scheduler easily from shared office tablets, without constant logins

User Journey — Before & After

Before Redesign: Room availability was shown in a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen, which wasn’t immediately clear. Users had to swipe to see more time slots and navigate to a separate options screen to view full schedules or multiple days. This bar element, intended to simplify booking, often caused more confusion and cluttered the interface.
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‍After Redesign: The new home screen is cleaner and easier to navigate. By removing the confusing time bar, the interface feels more intuitive. A dedicated button opens a clear calendar view, giving users an instant overview of room availability.

To improve the Meeting Room Scheduling App, I explored multiple ways to streamline the booking process while keeping the interface simple and familiar. I started with quick sketches and wireframes to visualize different approaches, focusing on how users interact with tablet apps in shared office environments.

Several key feature ideas emerged from this exploration:

• Instant Schedule Option: A fast-track button to book a meeting in the next available time slot with minimal input.
• Multi-Meeting Scheduling: The ability to add multiple bookings in one flow, without restarting the process each time.
• Clear Availability Overview: Replacing the confusing availability bar with a button that opens a familiar calendar view, allowing users to see all free slots at a glance.
• Tablet-Friendly Interaction: Large touch targets, minimal steps, and a clean layout designed for quick, on-the-go use in shared spaces.

These ideas shaped the core of the redesign, ensuring the app stays functional, easy to use, and scalable for future needs.

With clear goals from the ideation phase, I focused on turning these ideas into practical design solutions that improve usability without adding unnecessary complexity.

The biggest change was simplifying how room availability is presented. I removed the confusing horizontal availability bar and replaced it with a dedicated button that opens a calendar view. For added convenience, users can also swipe once to preview time slots or swipe twice to open the full calendar.

The booking flow was also reworked to reduce the number of steps. From the home screen, users can now access scheduling options with a single tap.

Given that this app is used on shared, wall-mounted tablets, I designed with large touch targets, clear spacing, and readable text sizes optimized for standing users who may view the screen from a distance. The visual design remains subtle and professional, avoiding unnecessary distractions.

All design decisions were guided by three principles:

• Clarity over novelty
• Efficiency of use
• Scalability for future needs

‍The result is a cleaner, more intuitive interface that supports quick and easy meeting scheduling.