Five minutes was all it took for Austin Ellis to register for spring semester classes.

“In the past, it has sometimes taken me a few hours to find a schedule that works and is fairly manageable,” said Ellis, junior in Engineering.

An automated class scheduling Web site called Scheedule.com is Ellis’ solution for the University’s registration process.

“It’s amazingly convenient,” he said.

Scheedule was designed last fall by a team of University undergraduates as a project for the engineering open house.

“Looking through thousands of schedules to find one that would be the best for your needs can take hours,” said Suraj Samaranayake, junior in LAS and Scheedule project manager. “The whole point of the Web site is that finding a schedule for you shouldn’t take a long time.”

Scheedule is used as a supplement to the UI-Integrate Self-Service System, the traditional class registration tool at the University. Samaranayake said students use Scheedule to expedite the registration process and to ease frustrations commonly experienced with the University’s system.

“We found this to be an application that could make peoples’ lives easier,” he said.

Scheedule creates up to 20,000 schedule possibilities based on the courses a student selects. To narrow the search, the Web site offers a personal preference feature to help users find a schedule customized to their needs, Samaranayake said. Students can control factors like days, times of classes and the amount of time desired for a lunch break.

“If you don’t want morning classes, or don’t want Friday classes, or just want your classes closer together, you can set all these preferences and then find the best one that fits your needs,” Samaranayake said.

Once users find their perfect schedule, they can instantly connect to the University’s system and register for classes.

Samaranayake said over 10,000 students have accessed the web site for spring semester registration.

Brent Dirks, freshman in Engineering, has used Scheedule, but expressed concerns about the web site’s flexibility.

“Scheedule just makes up a bunch of random schedules for you,” he said. “I have a friend that is in a couple of merit sections, so she has to be in specific sections. With Scheedule, it was absolutely impossible to create a schedule to work with that.”

Dirks said he prefers to choose classes using Schedule Shuffler, a program that works in a way similar to Scheedule. He admitted Schedule Shuffler, a program available for download from Illinistudents.org, is not nearly as user-friendly as its competitor, but favored the web site’s overall results.

Samaranayake said Scheedule may soon expand to other schools, and will eventually include a book-buying option.