Project Overview

When traveling to different time zones with a busy meeting schedule in different cities, it can be challenging to keep your schedule organized and show up to the right places at the right time.

The problem statement is a calendar flow and interface that is smart enough to suggest meeting times, accounts for changing time zones, and proactively works for the user to make sure they are always on time for their meetings at the right place.

With a full schedule and always on the go, the user finds it difficult to manage and create new meetings on the calendar.

Solution

As an MVP solution we designed a simple timeline view sorted by days/weeks/months.

This view straightaway nosedives into informing the user of the day’s planned schedule, with constant alerts to help them take necessary timely actions, removes the unnecessary clutter and distractions and helps the user become more productive with proper planning with week and monthly view.

Preliminary Research

After conducting some preliminary research by conducting user interview and and taking inputs from surveys. We came down to two core functions that we wanted to focus on in our MVP: The app should show your upcoming schedule and remind you of important events.

The app should focus on helping the user accomplish four MVP tasks:

It has to be familiar to the user without a steep learning curve.
The user should be able to create and easily view scheduled meetings and be able to see what time zone the meeting is in.
The user needs a way to be able to see what time it is in different time zones to help them schedule meetings that would work for all parties.
The user should have clarity about how they spend their time.

Personas

Before starting to flesh out ideas by sketching out interfaces, I had to summarize my understanding of the user that was illustrated in the design exercise.

A traveling salesperson would be a subset group within the larger demographic of people relying on calendar in their daily lives. Basis a salesperson (i.e., Valentina), traveling through different timezones most of the time for sales and business meetings and the problems she would face, maintaining a busy meeting schedule and keeping up with her calendar to show up to the right places at the right time, I created her psychographic profile:

Pain Points & Key Features

Pain Points

Missed meetings and inconvenient meeting timing due to incorrect time calculations in different time zones.
Going back and forth from communicating over email with the client and scheduling/attending a meeting from a different app.
Keeping track of time zones between various origin, connecting and destination cities.
Faces scheduling issues as is becomes difficult to keep track of current/ongoing meeting time and keeping the next client posted if there are any delays.

Key Features

I have listed out some key features that will help me to prioritize important functions of the app that would aid in achieving user goals, as mentioned above:

A simple timeline view of the days for a given month which shows the scheduled events as separate cards.
The travel schedule of users integrated within the timeline with free slots duration and travel time between origin and client’s office is clearly mentioned.
Google Maps integrated location suggestions and automatic detection of client office/venue addresses with the option to view directions and time required to navigate from the current location.
Automatic detection of time zones/changes in time zones when scheduling a proposed meeting/traveling to an international client’s office.
When scheduling a meeting, time slots are shown in the form of a schematic timeline. The timeline shows two time zones — the client’s office location and the current location time zone.
Creation of sales meetings/appointments with a feature to maintain email-based communication to fetch meeting data from there and create events with a single tap.
Feature to inform the client in a single tap by using a pre-defined mail template in case the user is running late.

Wireframes

A brainstorming activity of sketching out low-fidelity ideas helped me to visualise the key features while accounting for the edge cases.

Visual Design

A simple timeline view of the days which straightaway nosedives into informing the user of the day’s planned schedule, with constant alerts to help them take necessary timely actions, removes the unnecessary clutter and distractions and helps the user become more productive with proper planning with week and monthly view.

Covering ground on the edge-cases like reminding the users of change in timezone upon entering international soil or any delay that might affect the scheduled meeting that follow it and to help user take necessary quick actions, increases the stickiness and likability of the user towards the app.

Scheduling a future meeting event details by adopting a more interactive yet more user-friendly way of creating a meeting appointment with the option of entering the timezone and using natural language processing to detect keywords and trigger contextual options delights the user.

Working on the principle of aiding transparency and healthier association, push notifications which improves upon the customer touchpoint to take decisions on the outset, without entering the app, evokes an intuitively positive response in the user’s mind.