A personal UX case study focused on improving UCLA’s Canvas Calendar interface by designing a Daily Dashboard that helps students see where they need to be — and when — at a glance.
Canvas Daily Dashboard: Simplifying the
Student Day
As a college student, I’ve often shared frustrations with classmates about the disorganized experience of using our learning management system (LMS) platform, Canvas. While it offers various tabs — like the Dashboard, To-Do list, Notifications, and Inbox — the Calendar tab is underutilized and often empty, even though it's the most intuitive place to view a student’s day.
What’s missing is a clear, centralized daily summary: there’s no section that tells students where they need to be, when classes or office hours are held, or what’s due that day.
This gap often forces students to jump between tabs just to piece together their schedule. That made me wonder — what if Canvas could pull all that information into a single, simple Daily Dashboard?
College Students Lack a Centralized, Day-to-Day View of Schedule on Canvas
PROBLEM
By visually laying out the structure of a student’s day, the dashboard helps them plan study time, breaks, and other commitments more effectively. The Google Calendar sync option allows students to integrate their academic schedule with personal calendars — promoting better balance and proactive planning across all areas of life.
Improves Time Management & Planning
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Instead of digging through notifications or messages for scattered details, students can see all time-sensitive logistics — like locations for lectures or who’s holding office hours — right when they open the app.
Easier Access to Time-Critical Information
Centralized Daily Schedule
Students often rely on multiple tabs just to figure out where they need to be each day. The Daily Dashboard brings together class times, locations, and office hours into one unified view — right on the Calendar tab.
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SOLUTION
Daily Dashboard — a new feature within Canvas that helps students plan their day by showing relevant info in one place
With this feature, the Calendar tab finally becomes a go-to space for students to know exactly where they need to be and when — all at a glance.
COMPARATIVE INSIGHTS
Canvas supported tasks — but not time.
While keeping all the research above in mind, I analyzed what the pain point was in the existing Canvas interface for my university: the current tools lacked daily clarity.
While it was a centralized LMS, mobile accessible, and had direct connectivity with instructors uploading assignments and assigning due dates, the calendar was underused with no class time/location visibility.
Other productivity and time management tools like Google Calendar or Notion (Notion Calendar) had excellent daily view and reminder features with highly customizable planners and dashboards.
Unfortunately, neither were specifically designed for academic structure (class-based) and required manual input with no integration with Canvas or automated syncing.
Time-Budgeting Benefits
As supported by research in educational psychology, college students benefit greatly from tools that help them visualize and structure their day (Garg, 2024). By centralizing class schedules and meeting times, the Daily Dashboard enables students to allocate time more intentionally, encompassing the importance of time budgeting and planning for college students and reducing stress and supporting both academic and personal goal-setting.
Usability & Satisfaction
Studies using eye-tracking reveal that inconsistent or unclear LMS navigation increases time to access key tasks and negatively affects student satisfaction (Conley, Earnshaw, & McWatters, 2020).
The Daily Dashboard addresses this by offering a predictable, consistent space to quickly see class times, locations, and meetings each day — reducing friction and improving user experience.
Fragmented Awareness
Research shows that students often experience fragmented information awareness — the challenge students face when trying to stay organized across separate tools like inboxes, course dashboards, and external calendars to piece together their daily academic responsibilities (Schoonenboom, 2022).
My proposed Daily Dashboard aims to reduce this fragmentation by unifying critical, time-sensitive information into one accessible daily view.
Together, these studies validate the importance of building a unified daily view within Canvas to reduce friction, improve planning, and enhance the overall learning experience for students.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Schoonenboom, J. (2022). Fragmented information awareness in digital learning environments. Proceedings in Human-Computer Interaction / Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.
Garg, S. (2024). The economics of time management: Maximizing productivity and psychological well-being. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches in Psychology, 2(Special Issue 1), 205–212.
Conley, Q., Earnshaw, Y., & McWatters, G. (2020). Examining course layouts in Blackboard: Using eye-tracking to evaluate usability in a learning management system. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 36(4), 373–385.
Balancing Accuracy and Interpretability
RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Current Canvas Calendar
UX Redesigned
Course location visible and office hours also available
No visibility into daily schedule or where to be — even when classes are happening
Able to sync to Google Calendar to facilitate personal and academic schedules
Improving Canvas Calendar for Student Clarity
The current Canvas Calendar shows an empty state when no assignments or instructor-created events are scheduled—leaving students with no information about where to be or what’s happening that day.
The updated design introduces a Daily Dashboard that centralizes class times, office hours, and locations into a single, easy-to-scan view — helping students quickly understand their day at a glance.
VISUAL DESIGN: BEFORE & AFTER
IMPACT & SUCCESS METRICS
In a hypothetical situation, I’d measure the success of this feature through some of the following sample metrics:
Reduction in missed classes or office hours
% of students opening the Calendar tab daily
# of students syncing to Google Calendar
Qualitative feedback like “Canvas finally tells me where and when I need to be”
If implemented, this feature could increase engagement with the Calendar tab, which currently only shows events that are manually input or tagged as calendar items by instructors, and reduce the friction students feel when navigating their academic schedule.
Measuring Success
TAKEAWAY & FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
This was my first case study project, so I intentionally focused on a small but meaningful change I would want to see in my own student experience. Rather than trying to reinvent Canvas, I approached it with curiosity — asking how a familiar platform could better support clarity and structure in our daily academic lives.
This project taught me that great design isn’t always about adding more features — it’s about making existing systems work smarter for the user. Even a simple improvement, like a Daily Dashboard, can make a real difference when it aligns with how people think, plan, and move through their day.
If I were to take this idea further, I would explore how Canvas could automatically extract key updates from professor or TA announcements — such as changes to class times or locations — and dynamically reflect those in the Daily Dashboard. This would reduce confusion and help students stay informed in real time, especially during fast-changing academic weeks.
Next Project
DailyDrop
Canvas Daily Dashboard
A simple redesign to help students know where to be, when, and why.
Canvas Daily Dashboard
A simple redesign to help students know where to be, when, and why.