Global Time — Coursera Interaction Design Captsone
From U.C. San Diego on line via Coursera comes a Capstone Project assignment in which we are asked to think about how we interact with time. I started out with grandiose visions of redesiging time. Think Einstein, relativity, how do we really experience time and what is it? Then came the design process, user observations and interviews, and a solution that turned out to be much simpler than anything I had envisioned.
In todays world, and this seems like a no-brainer, people schedule meetings across time zones. OK, duh, you may be thinking at this point. In my user observations a banker, who has clients all over the world, took me through his meeting scheduling process. He has to schedule meetings with clients across the globe. His meetings cross time zones, date lines, and the relative time difference changes depending on daylight savings time here in the U.S. Amazingly enough, in this era of digital assistants, he does all of this manually. His calendar program doesn’t help him to see the time differences with his clients.
My prototype sets out to assist the user in scheduling meetings with clients across the globe, not by attempting to auto-schedule the meeting, but by showing the user the time zone differences so that he doesn’t have to do this manually. The point of view is that the computer is a helpful assistant, not the task doer, but the task helper. The feature set is called GlobalMeet. You can try the low fidelity prototype here https://sketch.cloud/s/y9mz8/all/page-1/main-screen/play
A key design decision was to make GlobalMeet a simple feature set that could be added to existing calendar programs. It started out a little too simple, with just a screen showing meeting invitees and the time differences relative to the person sending the invites. That first screen is shown below, with a more detailed screen that follows.
The users I spoke to have software they use for work, and, in many cases, they do not choose this software. They are not interested in a flashy reinvention of everything they do. They want simple solutions to real problems that make their job easier, without have to learn new mental models, unless they add sigificant value.
In GlobalMeet, the user selects the multi-time zone meeting option. From there, as in existing calendar programs, they invite clients. GlobalMeet then displays a time interface, showing the relative time differences for all involved. This interface is shown in the figure below.
In my dreams of redesigning time, I would never have thought of something so simple as a small redesign of how time is displayed on existing calendar programs. The idea came from watching and interviewing users.
Based on feedback from user testing (on usertesting.com), the feature has the potential to be useful. Much design work remains to make this into a finished product.