Schedule Redesign & Retention
Our most complained-about tool became one customers love, after two years of feedback and five honest conversations with the people who used it every day.
5x Drop in Complaints in 1 year
Diagnosing Churn
NBCUniversal GEM Award
Role
UX Designer, project lead
Team:
UX Research Team, Product, Dev
Tools:
Figma, WalkMe
Timeline:
2023-2024
01: THE PROBLEM
34% of negative feedback pointed to the schedule.
Two years of survey data and an increase in churned customers told us this was a problem. But it never told us what admins wanted instead.
02: THE APPROACH
Five interviews to find out what admins actually wanted.
I interviewed five admins myself and tested a redesigned list view, trying to uncover how they actually worked on the day-to-day.
03: THE FINDINGS
Admins don’t think in lists, they think in venues.
4/5 participants said organizing by location would finally solve the problem.
04: THE OUTCOME
Complaints dropped 5X in one year, and the model is now expanding into other products.
From one complaint per 248 users to one per 1,230, while the user base grew. I received a company-wide GEM award for diagnosing and helping fix customer churn.
THE PROBLEM —
Two years of feedback. One dominant complaint.
SportsEngine HQ is an all-in-one platform for sports organizations, handling registration, rostering, scheduling, and communication for leagues and clubs of all sizes. Season Management is the admin-facing product where organization directors set up seasons, assign teams to divisions, and manage game schedules.
For nearly two years, we collected in-product feedback through a WalkMe survey embedded directly in Season Management. The picture that data painted was hard to ignore, and increasingly urgent given the business pressure to understand churn.
Results from WalkMe survey popup with 34% of negative feedback (1-2 stars) having to do with scheduling topics.
WHAT THE DATA TOLD US
Scheduling was the #1 complaint from our customers.
THE GAP —
Knowing what’s broken isn’t the same as knowing what to build.
We had a clear baseline of usability complaints such as pagination limits, no daily view, no visibility into venue conflicts. What we didn’t have was a vision for what would actually make a meaningful difference to admins, or what would help improve customer churn.
Previous schedule list view.
Top User Pain Points
01
Bulk editing was broken
The list view capped at 25 events per page, making it tedious and error-prone to update a season’s worth of games at once.
02
No clear daily view
Admins had no way to get a clean picture of what was happening on a single day across their organization.
03
No venue visibility for complex orgs
Organizations managing multiple venues had no way to see open time slots or scheduling conflicts across fields.
RESEARCH IN ACTION —
Five interviews to find the experience admins actually wanted.
I partnered with our research team and took ownership of the customer conversations on a short turnaround. I had two goals going in: confirm which known pain points most affected admins day to day, and pressure-test a redesigned list view we believed would address them.
Before and After: Old list view vs. Mockup shown to participants in the study.
Feedback on the new list view
Admins responded well to the updated direction. They liked the infinite scroll. They liked that it anchored to the current date automatically. Several called out that it felt close to the public-facing microsite they already trusted.
STRATEGIC PIVOT —
Customers told us this was the wrong mental model entirely.
We expected the interviews to confirm that a better list view would close the gap. Instead, every participant pointed to a different solution. All five mentioned needing a true calendar view by month, week, and day which we had a feeling they may need. 4/5 said what would help most was seeing the schedule organized by location, not chronology which we did not predict.
WHAT WE ASSUMED USERS NEEDED
A better list that addressed their complaints
Our theory going in was that pagination, filtering, and bulk edit would solve the core pain points. Admins seemed to confirm this in the early part of each conversation.
WHAT USERS ACTUALLY NEEDED
A schedule organized by facility and field
Admins think about their schedule spatially. They want to see every field at every venue at a glance, not scroll through a list to reconstruct that picture in their heads.
New Venue-based schedule concept.
WHAT WE SHIPPED —
Three big schedule changes.
The research gave us direction and confidence to move forward on the redesign. We shipped these three improvements i the admin management tool and also implemented the list and calendar view on the customer-facing org websites.
01
New List View
Infinite scroll, current-date anchoring, and filtering by game type and team.
02
Venue Schedule View
Schedule organized by facility and field, with conflicts surfaced inline, plus standard month and week calendar views.
03
Month Calendar View
Update multiple events at once instead of navigating in and out of individual records.
IMPACT —
The complaints dropped and praise started showing up.
We tracked the same WalkMe feedback channel after launch and compared to our baseline. The shift was visible within months and held over the following year, even as the user base grew.
80%
fewer complaints per user
1 in 248 → 1 in 1,230 users
76%
fewer negative comments
101 → 24 per month
78%
fewer schedule complaints
27 → 6 per month
SENTIMENT SHIFT
4 and 5 star ratings increased ⭐️
Comments like “I love the new calendar” began appearing where schedule complaints used to dominate.
WHERE IT’S HEADED NEXT —
The venue-based model is now expanding into our video streaming product
A few years later, now working on SportsEngine's video and streaming product, I realized a similar issue in how tournaments are represented to our users. We received feedback that viewers were having a difficult time finding the right event in a tournament with hundreds of games. I presented our findings from the previous redesign and pushed the product team towards a similar solution.
Codex AI prototype of venue schedule view.
RECOGNITION —
I recieved a company-wide GEM Award for helping our exec team diagnose and solve a big customer churn reason.
NBCUNIVERSAL GEM AWARD - 2024
Stepping up in a challenging time
“The product team was under real pressure to understand churn and articulate a clearer path forward. Running the customer interviews on a short turnaround, translating findings into a concrete roadmap, and helping guide the strategic direction gave business and product leadership something solid to communicate from. The result relieved pressure on the team and built confidence in where the product was headed, at a moment when that confidence mattered.”
- Jordan Carlson: Product Director
WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
Run interviews earlier in the feedback cycle, not after two years of survey data.
We had directional signal in the WalkMe data within the first few months of collecting feedback. Waiting until the complaint volume was undeniable resulted in losing customers. Pairing quantitative feedback monitoring with periodic customer check-ins would help surface customer problems sooner. After learning this lesson in this project, I started pushing the product team towards this continuous discovery practice.
WHAT THIS PROJECT REINFORCED
The job isn’t to validate the solution you already have.
We went into these interviews fairly confident that a better list view would close the gap. It helped our direction for that redesign, but the real value came from having customers brainstorm with us on how we can make their life easier. It was a great reminder that validating direction alone and not involving customers in the early discovery could result in building a feature that customers don't find value in.