Case Study —Calendar for a Traveling Saleswoman

Take the stress out of planning and focus on your work.

Context:

Valentina leads sales and business development for a Fortune 500 company. She travels 3 out of 4 weeks in the month, and when she travels, it’s almost always internationally. Between all her travel to different time zones and a busy meeting schedule in different cities, she finds it challenging to keep up with her calendar to show up to the right places at the right time.

Problem Statement :

How might we help the user to keep up with the calendar to show up to the right places at the right time.

Design Challenge :

Design a calendar flow and interface that is smart enough to accommodate meeting times based on every client’s schedule, accounts for changing time zones, and is proactively working for Valentina to make sure she is always on time for her meetings.

Project Goal:

1. Create a calendar planning app that can be processed at a glance.
2. Has the ability to create events in different time zones without schedule conflicts.
3. Get the Valentina to their meetings on time.
4. Helping the salespeople travel and reach the client destination on time without any hassles, despite being alien to international lands.
5. Creating meeting appointments easily within the app, with dynamic intimations being given to the client once tagged as a participant in the meeting event.

Step 1 : Build Empathy

Assumptions

1. When I was first assigned this task I made the assumption that all calendar apps are the same and all have the same basic functionality.
2. Another assumption is that most people just use whatever app they have that came preinstalled with the OS.

Research

Three major apps were used to collect a baseline knowledge of what tools were already available, iOS Calendar (mobile and desktop), Google Calendar (mobile and desktop), Microsoft Outlook (desktop) As expected while exploring each app, many similarities were found with different UI’s. The most surprising aspects were when a highly useful feature was found on one platform it was rarely found on the competitor’s app. Even more surprising was that some useful features found in a mobile app were not found in the associated desktop app and vice versa. The three most relevant features not transferred across platforms were, at the time of writing.

Survey

With an expanded mind frame of personal organisational needs, I started developing an online survey for maximum reach. I came up with a short 9–10 question survey that was single/multiple choice.

Interview

The first step I took was taking an ear shot survey of those at nearby desks to see what they were using. The informal survey consisted of three questions:

1. What calendar do you use?
2. What do you like about it?
3. What do you wish it could do?

The responses received really helped open our minds to how others organize their lives with a calendar

Step 2: Define

Analyze the Research Data

One thing I love about google forms is that it automatically aggregates survey data into graphs for a quick assessment of collected responses. With plenty of pie charts and bar graphs to get a basic understanding, I turn to individual assessments of each survey.

Data showed based on assumptions that

1. Maximum number of users manage their personal and business events in the same calendar.
2. Average number of users checked time changes while travel as a frustration.
3. Minimum number of users had trouble understand flight information in their calendar.

Create a Persona

Persona

Pain points

Before journey

1. Missed meetings and inconvenient meeting timing due to incorrect time calculations in different time zones.
2. Not knowing the schedule on the client’s calendar and going back and forth over mail to decide on a time.

On journey

1. Keeping track of time zones between various origin, connecting and destination cities.
2. Avoiding scheduling issues by keeping track of current meeting time.
3. Switching between various apps like chat, mail, doc, calendar, cab, clock and google search etc.

User goals & needs

User goal should always be in the customer’s language. It provides valuable insight on what our user wants, even if it sounds too much to ask for.

1. User don’t want to think so much about tracking time zones again.
2. User want to quickly schedule convenient and mutually agreed meeting times.
3. User want to keep my client posted when am running late.
4. User don’t want to switch between multiple apps.

Step 3: Ideate

User Story Map

User Guide Map

User Flow Diagram & Sitemap

One of the goals of the project was to keep the app easy to use and process as much information on one screen as possible.

The research showed that the most common calendar view used were month, week, day and agenda view, respectively. Responses during research were not limited to one choice, since it was likely that no one view could solve all organisational needs.

In the survey we found that Month and week were the most favourable views so focus was put on those views first. The user flow diagram and sitemap for the bulk of the project was pretty straight forward due to the nature of calendars. Reducing the number of pages and using partial transitions helped to optimize the flow. the idea was that the page flow would proceed from the most used page to the next desirable pages coming next.

Information Architecture of Calendar App

Step 4: Sketching

Step 5: Prototype

Step 6: Design

Step 7: Usability Testing

Testing is part of every step of the UX process and it helps to work out any of the issues with the design. The prototypes were taken to random people and asked them to complete certain tasks. These included:

1. App navigation
2. Creating a new event
3. Finding the best time for a meeting in multiple time zones.
4. Access settings
5. Viewing current meetings

We have done the following testing

1. Hallway Testing
2. Expert Review Testing
3. AB Testing
4. Multivariate/ bucket Testing (If Required)

Conclusion

Calendars are not as simple as you think and the way users utilize them is even more complicated. Some users are very passionate about the use of calendars while others just use what they have by default. In either case the information needs to be presented to the user in a meaningful way.

Design Toolkit

Sketch, Illustrator, Google Forms, Google Drive, Xtensio, Lucid Charts, Pen and Paper, Material Design and a daily dose (or two) of espresso.