Our learnings: building in-app scheduling

Building products is a cycle of identifying signals (data, feedback) and using intuition and patterns to make decisions. We’ve learned a lot about how to prioritize, and our goal with these product updates is to invite you into the process and learn about how we think & build at CoffeeBreak.

What did we add?

We added a feature where users can set and update meeting details in-app & automatically have calendar invites sent to both participants. After users express intent to meet and get into a match, they can use this to set meeting details (time, location, and duration) in the context of the conversation. This also gets sent as a calendar invite to both parties emails, no app switching required!

Why did we decide to add it?

This feature was heavily motivated by user feedback. Scheduling is painful and usually requires a lot of back and forth (which leads to drop off). With in-app scheduling, users can skip the email exchange step and still achieve the finality of calendar invites being sent out. As an added benefit, with more information on when people meet, we can ask users for more timely feedback on meetings and help them navigate follow-ups.

What sort of things did we consider as we were building it?

Calendar integrations. We wanted this feature to be immediately useful for users without them having to give us access to their calendars. This also helped us limit some of the scope & potential privacy concerns we had around it.

Email privacy. We did a little bit of extra work to make sure that emails weren’t getting shared without explicit opt-in: right now, the meeting gets sent as two individual invites. That being said, we’ve already gotten the feedback that not having both emails on invites causing some friction.

UI/UX. There’s already products that are completely focused around scheduling (GCal, Outlook, Calendly) which we could compare and draw inspiration from.

What were our initial takeaways?

Initial reactions to the feature has been great; we’ve seen a lot of usage and more timely feedback on the product/meetings.

What are our next steps?

We get a lot of feedback on scheduling being an overall pain point. Scheduling involves a lot of things lining up perfectly (time, location, intent) and typically happens over a few asynchronous messages. The more we can reduce friction / steps involved, the more likely we can help people meet successfully. We’ll definitely continue to invest in these features.

Thoughts? Questions? We’d love to hear from you.

We’re constantly learning as we go and we’d love to learn with you. Shoot us a note at hello@coffeebreakapp.com.

Originally published at https://www.coffeebreakapp.com on April 16, 2019.