King Library Booking

A redesign of San Jose State University & King Library's frustrating study room booking portal

Role

UX Designer

Date

Apr - July 2025

Scope

User Research, Usability Testing, Prototyping

Tools

Figma, Google Forms

Highlights

Video of prototype flow

01 The Problem

SJSU students looking to book a semi-private room for studying are met with the outdated and frustrating King Library Booking Portal. How can I redesign it to make it easier to use and visually appealing?

Challenging Bias

I've long been frustrated with public sector service portals. If you wanted to do something mundane like renew your passport or change your drivers license, you'd have to jump through archaic websites and be left confused.

But they don't have to be confusing. Government portals like BenefitsCal prove that accessible design can still be modern and user-friendly.

Context

  • The portal is primarily used by SJSU students.

  • Books semi-private rooms for calls, studying, or resting

  • Jointly ran by SJSU and SJPL (San Jose Public Library)

02 Design Audit

Original landing page

I began by understanding the overall flow and structure of the process by combing through the portal’s pages and drop downs. I then mapped potential issues against NN/g's 10 Usability Heuristics, the most critical are as follows.

Inability to Manage Bookings

Users must dig through email to cancel. With no in-app option and a 2-hour limit, managing bookings is impossible.

Overwhelmed by Options

The ability to book by time, space, and calendar view is unnecessary and overwhelming for a task this simple.

Messy Wall of Text

On landing, users are hit with a wall of text. Important info is buried under a lack of visual hierarchy and inconsistent styling.

Inconsistency in Terms

The form dropdowns for “Category” and “Zone” contain the same items which can confuse the user, what's the difference?

03 Usability Testing

A heuristic evaluation is just the first step. Validating these issues through usability testing with real participants is necessary to understand the pain points.

Who We Tested

Five SJSU students (ages 19–21) with varying familiarity with the booking portal. This reflects the portal’s core user group.

What We Asked Them To Do

Students were asked to book a group study room for 5 people at 6:00 PM, three days out. Then came a twist: one group member was now only free after 7:00 PM. Could they reschedule?


The scenario was designed to be realistic and to cover the full booking flow. They were also asked to use the Think-Aloud Protocol.

Common Pain Points

In the first prompt, participants already ran into major roadblocks.

What Happened

But the second prompt was the real deal-breaker. Every single participant failed to reschedule without external help.

This was because the cancel link only exists in the email confirmation. This was intentionally not mentioned in the prompt to mirror how many students overlook their inboxes.

What Was Measured

After testing, each user completed a System Usability Scale (SUS) to quantify their experience. The result was a 37/100 which is classified as “poor.”

The average score across systems is a 68/100. In this particular flow, the booking process ranks well below average.

Real Frustration

The second prompt by far created the most friction. Users would click into related but incorrect pages, scanning every detail on every page, and still couldn't find a way to change their booking.

Ultimately, many resorted to asking their theoretical group mates to create a new booking, or resorting to researcher help.

04 Redesign

With the results from both the heuristic evaluation and the user testing, I could head into the redesign with a clearer understanding of the issues present.

The redesign also aimed to produce a working prototype that lets users complete the entire booking flow in order to validate the redesign

Improved Landing Page

  • Replaced visually busy banner

  • Removed wall of text, integrated info where needed

  • Search and calendar view side-by-side

  • Clearer text hierarchy

Improved Filter Search

  • One cohesive room search (rather than time vs. space)

  • Date-first flow (more intuitive than space-first)

  • Improved 2-hour limit salience

  • Clarified difference between floor and zone filters

  • Cut filters already met by all rooms

Added Manage Bookings

  • Ability to change the booking date and time

  • Ability to delete booking

  • Scalable to multiple bookings

  • Scroll to view previous bookings

Improved Search Results

  • No placeholders — representative room pictures

  • Improved information organization on room cards

05 Validation

I ran five user tests in the same format as the discovery phase in order to validate and confirm that the redesign did in fact improve on the original design.

Continued Refinement

  • I ensured that the procedure and metrics measured were consistent to accurately measure improvement.

  • As the validations were being conducted, I continued to refine my redesign based on user feedback.

  • The following is the full final validation flow that participants would run through.

What Was Measured

The resulting SUS Score was a 87.5/100 which is classified as “excellent," an improvement from the original score of 37/100.

Overall Satisfaction

At the end, users were asked how easy to use, confusing, aesthetically pleasing, and organized the new portal was, and the results were resounding.

05 Reflection

I was really glad that the redesign was both a qualitative and quantitative success!

What I Learned

Going through the full process, from discovery and research to redesign and validation, showed me that effective design isn’t about personal taste. It’s about evidence. User behavior and feedback revealed gaps I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, grounding design decisions in reality rather than assumptions.

What I Enjoyed Most

For me, interviewing participants was my favorite part! These interview sessions allowed me to see and hear their frustrations as well as get their input on my thought process and design decisions.


The redesign process wasn't smooth. As each participant ran through my prototype, I found more and more things for me to fix through their input. Seeing how they interacted with the old and new portal and taking their input to make something very real was incredibly rewarding.

Next Steps

I’d expand the filter system to support multi-selects, like choosing multiple floors or capacities because during my testing, I found that many users just wanted any available room, not a specific one.

I’d also explore the calendar-based booking view. It’s a visual, intuitive approach, but complex to prototype and test, so it wasn’t fully realized in this version.