Google Calendar integrates with Flock
Previously Flock integrated with Google Calendar to get notifications for upcoming events. The discovery was poor as users needed to visit a separate page on Flock Appstore to set up notifications. I designed the Google Calendar integration in Flock to solve user-needs of different persona at the workplace who use Google Apps. It was interesting to redefine the scope of the feature.

My Role
I worked on this feature as a product manager as well as the lead designer. I laid down the goals, discussed with stakeholders(Product Head and CEO), conceptualized flows, created visual designs, and communicated the interactions to developers. Post-launch, I conducted usability testing and analyzed the usage along with the customer requests to improvise the feature.
Background
Flock is an instant messaging platform that solves the communication needs of teams at a workplace. It competes with Slack, Facebook for Workplace, and Microsoft Teams. It integrates with different productivity tools to solve user-needs at the workplace (Google Calendar, Google Drive, Jira, Trello).
Brief
To integrate Google Calendar deeply with Flock to enhance the experience of our existing users and increase the usage of the app.
High-level objective
To improve retention of users on Flock
Key Result | To enhance the experience and increase the usage of the Google calendar app on Flock
Correlation | 10% of our 6 weeks retained teams use Google Calendar App
Previous Solution | It was bot notification based integration which allowed users to receive notifications for the event created, updated and reminders.


Approach
To know if a design is successful, we must define what success looks like so that we can track and measure it. I defined the goals to understand how to delight the user, increase engagement and adoption of the new features, improve retention and measure success for the Google Calendar App.

Understanding our users
Customer requests
I would like to request that Flock would integrate with Google Calendar for making schedules, meetings, etc.
It would be great to be able to add events to my google calendar from flock. So when I schedule a meeting in a chat, I want to simply click on the date and time in the chat and Flock would add an event to my Google Calendar.
Wanted to know if its possible to create Events in Flock and sync to G-Calendar ?
User Persona
At Flock, we have different personas based on their roles in an organisation. From the broader persona of the users, I derived the specific motivations and goals that the users have for using the Google Calendar Integration with Flock by conducting interviews with users of a similar profile.


Scenarios — Job stories
As we chose to solve the needs of our users, the most important task was to understand the use cases. I worked on Job Stories as they refine the situation based on context and motivation to answer “When and why will users need the Google Calendar App?”
- When Pam wants to set up an interview, she wants to have the lists of her events handy so that she can easily plan her meeting.
- When Pam sets up an interview, she wants to know if the interviewer or interviewee declined her event so that she knows if she needs to reschedule the meeting.
- When Andrew gets a calendar invite for a meeting at 3pm today from his team mate, he wants to accept it right away so that he doesn’t forget.
- When Andrew starts his day, he wants to look at the upcoming meetings so that he can plan his day in advance.
Research
Data Gathering
Survey | We did a survey to understand how many of our users use Google Calendar to understand the size of the potential users.
Analysis of existing data | Over 45% of our teams were authenticated via google auth, indicating a potential user base of Google Calendar.


Research Highlights
- Users plan their day by looking at the meetings lined up for the day.
- Mostly use an instant messaging tool at workplace and hence end up responding late for the calendar invites received via gmail.
- Plan their meetings while in a discussion and finalise the time then and there, the user needs to take an extra step to go out of context and create the event for the set of participants he was talking to.
- Generally type the time to catch up in a channel than setting up a calendar invite, as that is faster.
Debriefing the Brief
Design a quick and intuitive way to access meetings (via Google Calendar) on Flock, which enables user to accept/decline an event, reminds them before the meeting, and lets them create events from within Flock.
Revisiting the Job stories
1. Job that user wants to get done | When Pam sets up an interview, she wants to know if the interviewer or interviewee declined her event so that she knows if she needs to reschedule the meeting.
2. Existing Solutions | Pam looks at all accept/decline mails to evaluate if she needs to reschedule the meeting. She also needs to find another slot for rescheduling.
3. How do we help her complete the job | The product should allow Pam to create events and invite relevant members. It should inform her about who accepted/declined her event so that her meeting is a success. It should recommend if the meeting needs to be rescheduled and helps her set up the next meeting with ease.
Similarly, I worked on solving the remaining job stories.
Explorations
We were trying to solve for:
- What is will be the easiest way for the users to view their daily schedule?
- Easily setting up meetings without losing any context.
- Users are on time for their meetings and don’t miss informing the creator about their presence or absence in any particular event.
Feature ideas
- Notifications for event invites, updates, reminder and deletion. Users can accept/decline events from within Flock, colours are used to indicate the response. When the user creates an event, she will be notified when other users accept or decline her event.



- Users can view their upcoming events day wise with details about time, attendee, location, description etc . By default today’s date would be selected, user can change the date to see events for that day.


Users can create/reschedule events from within Flock. The list of invitees for any event from Flock directly based on the selected conversation.



Notification Alerts | user can decide the events she want be alerted for.



To increase the usage and discovery of the app we tried a few experiments
Experiments — Improve Discovery
- Social Proofing | Sanya + 5 others are using calendar
- Google Sign in | Preinstall the Google Calendar app
Experiments — To enhance the experience and usage
- Natural Language Parsing | E.g. If I say in a channel “Lets meet at 5pm” - it prompts me to create a calendar event from within the chat tab.


Final designs
The users can view all the events of the day in the sidebar and can accept and decline the events directly from the sidebar.




Notifications via the Google Calendar App on Flock


Date Selector to view meeting schedules across different dates


Authentication Flow for the First Time Users via Sidebar and Flock Appstore





Challenges | I had limited design choices as this is a third party application, it was very difficult to introduce features that are not a part of Google Calendar App.
Usability testing — Signals
Post the launch of the product, we conducted usability tests to understand the problem areas of our solution and get user feedback.

Insights
- Users found it difficult to understand declined events. This was a visual design issue, we tried multiple versions and conducted a UT to verify.




- Users wanted to link multiple calendars, in the current solution we supported only the primary calendar
It is very nice to have a new Google Calendar integration, but unfortunately it becomes less useful if one uses more than 1 calendar in the account (e.g. to separate personal and business events).


Post Launch Story — Metrics
I would not be able disclose the exact numbers of the metrics being tracked for measuring the success due to confidentiality.

Impact
- Google Calendar Integration is now in the top 2 apps in the Business/Productivity Category for Flock
- The usage of Google Calendar Integration increased by 300%. A user on an average opens the calendar app on Flock ~2 times in a day.
- Over 35% of the events created on Google Calendar linked via Flock are accepted/declined from within Flock
Learnings
Through this exercise, I learnt that it is very important to define what success of the product looks like beforehand. This helps us solve the problem better both from the user’s standpoint as well as the stakeholder’s.
