KTP Life App

Making a busy event calendar easier to scan, filter, and personalize

KTP Life is used by 400+ members and prospective members of Kappa Theta Pi at the University of Michigan to manage chapter, rush, social, and committee events.

As the calendar grew more crowded, every event still looked the same. I designed a filtering and color system to help users quickly understand what mattered to them, then worked directly with engineering to bring the feature into the live iOS app.

A busy calendar with no visual hierarchy

The original calendar used the same blue treatment for every event, whether it was a chapter meeting, rush event, social, or committee meeting.

Attendance requirements also varied by role: prospective members, new members, active members, and executive board members each had different events they needed to attend.

That became especially difficult during busy parts of the semester, when users were scanning several event types at once and needed different information depending on their role.

The challenge was making the calendar easier to scan without adding more complexity.

Color helped — until it became the problem

My first direction assigned a distinct color to each event type.

The categories became easier to distinguish, but user feedback surfaced a new issue: filling every card with color made an already busy calendar feel even louder.

Users also wanted more control over which events they saw and how categories were represented.

That feedback pushed the design beyond simple color-coding.

Designing for quick scanning and personal control

In the next iteration, I reduced the amount of color in the interface and introduced filtering so users could focus on the events most relevant to them.

The final design uses color as a lightweight cue rather than the entire visual treatment. Users can filter by event type, customize category colors, or rely on the default system without configuring anything.

The result is a calendar that still communicates differences at a glance, but feels much calmer when the schedule gets crowded.

Shipping the feature

I worked directly with the engineer to refine the interactions, respond to implementation constraints, and make sure the feature fit naturally into the existing KTP Life experience.

The final filtering and color-customization system was implemented and released in the KTP Life iOS app.

The redesigned calendar experience is now live in the KTP Life iOS app.

What I took forward

This project taught me how quickly one design decision can introduce a new tradeoff. Color improved differentiation, but it also increased visual noise, which pushed me to simplify the system and give users more control.

It also gave me experience carrying a feature beyond the design file and into a shipped product through direct collaboration with engineering.