Our project addresses the challenge of finding common availability among groups and efficiently scheduling meetings in college. As club leaders and community members, this is a salient issue in our personal lives. Through user interviews, a survey, Pareto analysis, hierarchical task analysis, and competitive analysis, we delved into the problem space. Our user research revealed a pressing need among undergraduate students for a convenient scheduling tool enabling calendar integration, customizable reminders and notifications, automatic time zone detection, and a persistent meeting record that eliminates the requirement to keep tabs on a one-time link. This is where our website Meeti comes in, providing a user-centric platform for college students to easily identify the optimal time for meetings. Before creating our final design, we developed and conducted usability testing on a low-fidelity prototype. Our iterative design process ensures that Meeti meets the needs and preferences of our users.
User Interviews: We first performed 8 user interviews with college students across the nation to explore users’ pain points and delights with scheduling meetings. These were our interview questions: How do you schedule meetings in college? Why? How do you feel when using this method? What do you like about this method? What difficulties do you face when scheduling meetings? What are you looking for in a scheduling tool?
Our interviews underscored the omnipresence of When2meet on college campuses as a tool for scheduling meetings, with many users indicating that they use it simply because it is the default. Users voiced frustration about the cumbersome process of manually inputting their availability and the visually unappealing interface of When2meet. They also indicated a desire for a scheduling website that seamlessly integrates with calendars, sends meeting reminders, and enables easy viewing of the availability breakdown for each time slot.
Survey: We next surveyed 50 students from colleges across the country. The responses revealed that the vast majority of college students use Google Calendar and When2meet. On a scale of 1-5, where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree, over half of the respondents rated existing scheduling tools as less effective in meeting their needs, as indicated by a rating of 2 or below. Around half of the respondents indicated dissatisfaction with calendar integration in existing tools. Several people noted that they often forgot to fill out or check the event link when using existing tools, with many struggling to recall the final meeting time. The survey link can be found here: https://forms.gle/Ehs1USb5RPfVZsL87.
Pareto Analysis: We collected data from the online messaging boards Reddit and Quora to identify college students’ pain points with when2meet. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WoQvgpxyKbgjMM77lSuEP-p-_kD27djOeT_5RMZ25_Y/edit?usp=sharing)
Hierarchical Task Analysis: We also performed a hierarchical task analysis for scheduling an event on when2meet. This highlighted the extraneous workload of having to consult one’s schedule when inputting availability, store and locate the one-time event link, and repeatedly check if more people have added their availability.
Competitive Analysis: We analyzed the features of 6 tools for scheduling meetings—when2meet, Doodle, Calendly, lettucemeet, Vailable, and Google Calendar. Although our previous research revealed that users desire reminders and notifications, few existing tools provide meeting reminders, and none offer notifications when someone inputs their availability. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MbmcpFWMW9MowkDU3QxUafZLp8GMEK5utG34j5DZrlw/edit?usp=sharing)
Cognitive Walkthrough and Usability Testing: We performed a cognitive walkthrough on our first iteration that revealed a lack of clear exit routes for users within our pop-ups. We also conducted usability testing with 2 users who completed 5 tasks—creating a new event, adding attendees, prioritizing attendees, inputting availability via calendar integration, and scheduling an event—while navigating through our low-fidelity prototype. Follow-up questions delved into their experiences with task completion and perceptions of specific features. The findings revealed user confusion regarding calendar synchronization but a positive reception of the attendee prioritization feature.
4. Automatic availability input via calendar integration with option to manually click/drag: When inputting their availability, users can directly click/drag on the calendar to manually edit their availability. They can also click the “sync my calendar” button and sync their Google Calendar, iCloud calendar, and Outlook calendar (which are used by 76%, 16%, and 22% of survey respondents, respectively). In our survey, 21 users indicated great dissatisfaction with calendar integration in existing tools. Users in interviews all expressed frustration with having to consult their schedules and manually input their availability with current scheduling schools, and this was also by far the top complaint in our Pareto. Usability testing on our low-fidelity prototype revealed that users are inclined to immediately start clicking/dragging on a calendar given their mental models. We adjusted our design so that users do not have to click a button to begin manually editing. Customizable reminders and notifications: On the event creation page, event hosts can check the “notify me when someone joins” box and indicate their preferred notification method. When viewing an event they created, event hosts can click “send nudge” to remind invited participants to input their availability. Meeting attendees receive confirmation of the scheduled meeting date/time as well as a Google Calendar invitation. 20% of the Pareto complaints concerning functional limitations were specifically about a lack of meeting reminders. Survey respondents mentioned that a lack of meeting reminders led to late arrivals and even absences at club meetings. By providing meeting reminders, our scheduling tool diminishes users’ cognitive workload. The automatic GCal invitation moreover supports seamless calendar integration. Account creation: A common user pain point with When2meet was the necessity of keeping track of the one-time event link and repeatedly checking it (which is also addressed by enabling notifications). Account creation eliminates the need for a one-time link and enables users to view events they created/joined in one place; if they sign in with Gmail, this facilitates calendar integration. Inviting and prioritizing attendees Several survey respondents noted that existing scheduling tools do not adequately support the scheduling of larger meetings, and our user interviews suggested being able to prioritize attendees based on importance for large meetings would be helpful. Hence, our website enables the prioritization of attendees when determining the optimal meeting time. Users offered positive feedback for this feature during usability testing. The option to invite attendees supports the notifications/reminders feature and is complementary with account creation. Our design provides clear exit routes, user control and freedom, error prevention via confirmation screens, and feedback, which are important usability heuristics. We retained the color gradient feature to view detailed availability breakdown, which users commented on positively in interviews and surveys. Our competitive analysis revealed that the scheduling tools we examined all provided detailed availability breakdowns as well, so this was an important feature to incorporate. Another common user pain point was the insufficiency of existing scheduling tools for supporting recurring events, so we made sure to enable recurring events.
Built With
- figma
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