Overview
Concerts are happening constantly, but not everyone is available, and those who can, feel anxious or insecure to go by themselves. How can we help these people who want to go to a nearby concert, but have no one to go with them, this is the question my team set out to solve.
Research
The interviews we performed of remote workers have shown that Google Calendar is a widely used app among them for scheduling their time, tasks, and meetings. The users find it difficult at times finding meeting times and have to resort to third-party tools like when2meet.
Redesign
We wanted to redesign a widely used tool by millions of people in a way it would add to the overall experience and feel natural with the Google ecosystem.
The feature we felt was lacking was the meeting with other people feature, which is not very simple to use but very important for people.
Features
Based on rapid brainstorming and prototyping, we came up with three different features that can help users find meeting times with their friends. A feature that shows available times for multiple users, a smart assistant, and a quick select view of who is available.
Feature 1
Our first feature is a feature resembling when2meet function where it displays all the times when people are available in the coming days, making it simple to find meeting times amongst a group of people for group projects, work meetings, or casual hang-outs.
Feature 2
The second feature is a smart assistant that pops up in the users screen and asks them if they want to meet with one of their friends, and then proceeds to show possible meeting times.
Feature 3
The third and last feature allows the user to see people who are free when choosing a meeting time. This is the most minimal of all the three features.
Iteration
Throughout the project we iterated on all three of the features through feedback from the interviewees.
“It’s hard to know I have to click on the button create to create the event” -Logan
I had originally planned to use the button Google already has to create the event being already there in the original design, but feedback showed it was hard to know they had to click on it, and suggested a new button closer to the task.
The new version had a button under the names with the option to “Find meeting times”. This new button was favored by all the users.
Reflection
The experience overall was very informative about how to do proper research, design along guidelines for a redesign, and working in a team. Organization is key when doing research, something as simple as a Google Doc or Google Sheet is very useful for organizing interview responses and tasks. It is vital to stick as much as possible to the original design style when doing a redesign since you don’t want to take away from it, only add.
Finally, communication amongst a design team is vital, the more the better, like reporting to the rest of the team opinions and ideas, as well as scheduling times to work on the design together. The experience overall was very informative and useful for future redesign experiences.