GTCalendar, a new way to get on time everywhere

Nowadays, people at work are very busy and their minds are too focused on each task they need to do and they get lost trying to meet their responsibilities.

That’s why I’ve started to look at the people who work at companies every day and I’ve found that it’s a little difficult when they need to meet with someone, like a customer, workmates, a potential client.

When people who need to attend the meeting are in different countries with not the same time zone, it’s a painful process because not all tools have the feature to configure time zones or more than one.
Why don’t let users configure all the time zones they want so they will be able to see what time is it in other countries at the same time?

In addition, I could see people created one event with more than one meeting in different hours with different people instead of creating different events to meet with each person. This makes the work very difficult because people who need to attend the meeting 30 minutes after it has started don’t get a notification and they forget about the meeting.

E.g. here she’s created one event to meet with 6 people at a different time: 2 people at 10:15 am; 3 people at 10:30 am; 1 people at 10:45 am.

One in five users has created events like this one, here we have a design opportunity to make it easier for them.
What will happen if we are also able to set notifications after the meeting has started? What will happen if we can send notifications in real time instead of sending a message by chat?

During the needfinding process, I’ve found not all tools let you see the guest’s calendar, and even when the guest doesn’t have an email with the same domain of the company.
Why not have a single application where you can synchronize all the email calendars you want and let you see each guest’s schedule?

Currently, there are apps that notify you a few minutes before you have the meeting but they don’t tell you how much time you have to get on time to the place of the meeting. Sometimes, setting a notification 10 minutes before the event is not enough. A lot of unplanned events can occur that affect your arrival time to the meeting and they are out of your control.
Why not get a notification that tells you when you should leave your current place to get on time to the meeting?

The point of view

Users need to be able to customize the calendar and take actions in notifications, so they will be able to create events faster and easier and they will be able to get notifications at any time and also send them in real time.

Storyboards and first paper prototypes

Keeping in mind the user’s needs in the entire design process is easy when you define them and also if you create storyboards of the main activities they do to achieve their goals.

I’ve created two storyboards to fix two of the main troubles I’ve found.

In this storyboard, the user gets a notification with the route he should take to get on time to the meeting. The notification is shown at a time before it is necessary to arrive at the meeting place on time.

In this storyboard, the situation shows a user that is behind schedule and needs to re-schedule the meeting.

Then I’ve designed the first prototypes and tested them with users to understand if they can achieve their goals easily and also where they have trouble to interact with the application.

Also, paper prototypes are the key to validate if the point of view is correct or if users are looking for something different.

Taking into account the storyboards, I’ve designed all the elements I’ve needed to let users approach the goals.

Here there are different screens and components that will let users interact with the prototype and achieve the proposed goals.

Testing paper prototypes let me assess the heuristics evaluation before testing them with real users.

After that, I designed the main wireframes to cover the basic flow to carry out the user testing stage.

The usability testing sessions were the best part of the process. This stage was very helpful to see how close I was to the users’ needs. I’ve seen how they interact with the prototype and also their reaction.

Here the user gets the notification from GTCalendar to get to the meeting on time. GTCalendar knows the user’s events and creates and shows notifications regarding the user’s current location and the place of the meeting. With this information, the application knows the time you need to arrive on time to the destination.

In this interaction, we can see the user rejecting the new meeting time and immediately sending a message to the owner of the event with the reason for the rejection.

Finally, the GTCalendar video presentation. The main goal and features are described there.

Conclusion

The applications there are today in the market let us schedule our day, week and even our lives, but we can’t get a notification that alerts us when we should start our commute to get on time to the meeting; nor send a notification to guests of the meeting when the event has already started; not even set all the different time zones we want in the calendar to know what time it is in other countries each time we’re going to create a meeting with the global work team; also, we can’t send a customized message when we reject a meeting.

We have already developed applications like Google Maps or Waze to know the time and route to arrive at a place; calendar apps inside our phones and laptops like Google Calendar, iOS Calendar, Windows Calendar; a lot of applications to send messages like Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat.
We just need to take all we have and start to synchronize each other to create something beyond what we have today, an application that really helps us not only to schedule our life but also an app that let us organize and communicate us the entire day with everyone without thinking all we should do if we just change the hour of the meeting.

There are a lot of design opportunities to work on and make the life of our users that work every day with a lot of people easier.