Connectly - abhinav

Defining The Background And Context

Humans evolve by adaptation. After the impact of covid around the world, we have learned to adapt to the current situation. Organizations and individuals are switching to digital and online platforms to carry on with their work and life. Which has led to an increase in digital meetings.

These digital meetings can be categorized into personal and professional meetings

Personal meetings

Casual meetings that help people to stay in touch, and connect.

Professional meetings

Meetings that are related to the work through which people update, collaborate, etc. with each other.

The factors represented in each meeting type are considered on an average scale.

I believe when we provide solutions to a user with a higher degree of pain it creates a more impact on their life.

After scoping out a few possibilities I decided to focus on helping agencies schedule meetings.

Defining The Problem

How might we help agencies effectively schedule meetings between their team and also between the team and clients?

What Was My Role?

Since this was a learning project that I did individually out of my interest. I got to were multiple hats as per requirements to complete the project.

Starting From Scratch

I was curious to know about the context of an agency and I started jotting down related questions.

Some of the questions were:

How does a studio/agency function?

What are the difficulties present in scheduling meetings?

How can a product of scheduling meetings be brought into the context of agency?

How can the product help in choosing the right slot?

What are the difficulties in scheduling meetings with a person in a different time zone?

What is the generic process of scheduling meetings?

How can the experience of clients be made better for seamless booking?

What supporting features are required for the product to function well?

Gathered the data based on the secondary research and my understanding of the problem space.

Understanding The Context And The Customers

Looking into the product gives me a clear visualization of three users (agency and their clients) that should be taken into consideration before creating the product.

Note: The agency organizer can be both a part of the agency team or just an organizer depending upon the size and several other factors of the agency.

Meet Steve

He is an agency team member and organizer who schedules meetings and acts as a connecting link between the agency team and its clients.

Experience Of Creating Meetings Before The Product

User Scenario: Since the product’s key focus is on scheduling meetings. We are considering viewing the current experience of creating the meeting with an agency organizer.

Experience map of an organizer trying to schedule a meeting.

While this map illustrates the problems faced by the organizer in scheduling the meeting there are also other factors such as categorizing and managing the meetings etc.

Meet Patric

He is an individual who does not have the skill or resources to do a particular job. Thus looks for alternative ways to do the job.

Insights Captured

Every person uses their calendar differently.

Different cultures perceive time differently.

It is very difficult for an agency to align with every client they work with based on the time zone, cultural differences, and many other factors that come into play

So I started digging deep and connecting the common pattern within the insights and asking the question on

What is missing?

No overall structure and constraint are present in the system to combine and bring everyone to the same page.

Analyzing The Market

So I analyzed a few competitors out in the market space to understand how are they solving the problems and provide a view of what I like and don’t like about them from a user’s perspective.

Some of the characteristics that I observed with the products in the market are

Breaking down the whole scheduling process into smaller chunks.

More emphasis is given to the scheduling party and not the meeting invitees.

Offering a wide range of flexibility and customization to the users.

Using the calendar as the home page when users enter the product.

No automatic meeting slot suggestions.

Products operate in a freemium business model.

How does the product make money?

These are some of the ways or business models in which the product can generate revenue.

Freemium

Offering a few basic features and meeting types of the product for free and charging for some premium features of the product.

This could lead to an increase in the adoption rate of the product.

Subscription

Offering the service of product for a period of time in exchange for money.

Businesses in most scenarios don’t switch the products they use as an individual consumer would.

This can lead to building trust and retention rates over a period of time.

What Is The Goal And Vision Of The Product?

Help the agency and clients effectively schedule the meetings.

Increase the percentage of people who attend the meetings.

The Solution I Arrived Upon

Providing polls for clients based on the common slots available between the agency’s team members.

Features Of The Product

Some of the features that provide a core value to the product when combined help the users do their tasks effectively.

Automated Slot Detection (for team members): Based on the calendar sync-in of all team members the product shows the common free slots available between them. Which offers more flexibility and reduces the work the organizer has to do.

Poll For Clients Considering the clients’ time and schedule while scheduling the meeting by providing them the freedom to choose their desirable slots from the options available.

Data On The Poll Making the data about the poll visible help the clients make better decisions while voting.

Possible Scenarios In Which Product Comes Into The Picture

“We need to discuss the current project”

“We need to update progress to the clients”

“I need to provide a presentation pitch”

“We need to brainstorm together”

Constructing The User’s Journey

User Flow Chart Of An Agency Organizer

User Flow Chart Of A Team Member

User Flow Chart Of A Client

Creating user flow brought clarity to the overall touchpoints of the user with the product before proceeding to create wireframes.

After that, I started sketching and pouring my thoughts about it into the paper. So that I can easily figure out if the idea makes sense without spending too much time on it.

Experimented with different variations of representing things to see which makes sense to the context.

Based on the low fidelity inputs, I created the medium-fidelity screens after a few iterations.

Setting Preferences

The ability to personalize the information or schedule timings offers a sense of freedom and control to the users. With the current scenario of the covid and its impact on us. People are shifting toward work from home. As a result, they want flexible working hours.

With this idea in mind, I created a page that helps the users set their preferences which will be reflected in the calendars and, get notifications and reminders.

My Calendar Page

Our brains are not built to remember a lot of things. But in this civilized world, we have a lot of things to remember from a list of ingredients to buy for a recipe to a meeting with your boss.

Writing or scheduling your day helps you recognize the things you have to do.

With the help of my calendar page, the users (the agency team members and organizer) recognize all the upcoming events and scheduled meetings.

In order to draw the attention of users to the upcoming meetings and events, the product lands the users every time on the my-calendar page first.

The users can also sync already existing calendars to their my calendar page. Which retrieves and shows schedules regarding just the work and meetings. Why? because your privacy matters.

Providing a structured view helps the users to converge at a common slot easily.

The slots where the users are unavailable or have some personal tasks to perform are filled with grey. The slots representing light blue are the booked slots. The slots filled with white are the free slots the users are available for a meeting.

The orange line is the current-time indicator.

The users have the primary navigation to change between other tabs and also the secondary navigation bar which helps the user to view the schedule in different ways and also edit the preferences.

Home Page

I knew that the home page was the core of the product it has to be well designed and thought through so that it helps the users perform their tasks effectively.

I was thinking should all team members be allowed to access and edit the contents on this page? Tried a few ways of representing the scheduled meeting.

Zoomed out a bit to understand from the shoes of an organizer which type of categorization makes it easier for them effectively schedule and manage meetings.

Which helped me create a home screen where the meetings and categorized on a multi-layered level from projects to client and team meetings. Also where the organizer can invite team members to the agency page.

Client Voting Page

In the stage of creating low fidelities, I sketched out one of my competitors scheduling pages in the market and thought about a few things.

How to enhance the experience of a client scheduling a meeting using that page?

How to bring the scheduling into the context of the product?

After figuring out the information and available slots that need to be put on this page for the clients to understand about it. I questioned how I can categorize the slots in a better way?

Through this, I categorize the available slots in a day-wise manner.

Onboarding An Agency Organizer

Click on the screen to play the video

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Prototype link: https://www.figma.com/proto/UcYZ5N943VXdbD7bW6L4FL/portfolio?node-id=102%3A24147&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=101%3A21463&starting-point-node-id=117%3A25310

Assumption: On a typical small to medium-sized agency usually doesn’t have a particular person just to manage and schedule meetings. So I’m assuming in this case that a person who does this is a part of the agency team and is also an organizer.

Onboarding A Team Member

Click on the screen to play the video

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Prototype link: https://www.figma.com/proto/UcYZ5N943VXdbD7bW6L4FL/portfolio?node-id=117%3A27525&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=101%3A21463&starting-point-node-id=117%3A25161&show-proto-sidebar=1

As every individual uses a calendar individually I needed to have constraints to bring everybody to the same context. So that it would be more feasible to be developed.

But also provided the flexibility to allow the sync in of other calendars where only the work and meeting-related info will be retrieved and shown in the product to maintain the user’s privacy.

Scheduling A Meeting (agency organizer)

Click on the screen to play the video

👉

Prototype link: https://www.figma.com/proto/UcYZ5N943VXdbD7bW6L4FL/portfolio?node-id=102%3A24147&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=101%3A21463&starting-point-node-id=102%3A24078&show-proto-sidebar=1

Breaking down the overall task into smaller chunks and providing feedback using a progress bar at the top helps the user easily do the task without getting overwhelmed. The feedback provided also nudges the user positively to complete the task.

Client Voting On A Poll

Click on the screen to play the video

👉

Prototype link: https://www.figma.com/proto/UcYZ5N943VXdbD7bW6L4FL/portfolio?node-id=117%3A24981&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=101%3A21463&starting-point-node-id=117%3A25081&show-proto-sidebar=1

Providing the poll data on the slots to the users also helps them take more clear and informed decisions and also nudges them over the slot.

The desired impact of the product on the user’s life

Agency Organizer

Significant decrease in workload the person has to face in order to schedule and follow up and organize meetings.

Agency Team Member

Team members feel a sense of importance in the team when their schedule is also being considered when creating a meeting.

Equality is being provided in the workplace.

Agency Clients

Able to make informed decisions about selecting poll.

Helps them feel in control to request a change in the slots when the available ones are not working for them.

Establishing The Brand Guidelines

Colour Pallet In Use

Connectly is a B2B Sass product that helps agencies schedule meetings. Blue is being used as the primary colour because we want the users(agencies) to feel a sense of trust and dependability in our product. The businesses are very loyal to the products they use and they usually don’t change them often. So they act as a long-term users of the product.

Orange was used as an accent color to grab the attention towards a particular area on the screens.

Typeface In Use

In order to match the traits of the product, I needed to choose a typeface that was very clean and minimal.

So I chose Noto Sans as it was a very clean typeface that is high on readability aspects. It is a typeface focused more on the side of utility rather than emotion which goes well with the product characteristics.

Logo Of The Product

The logo portrays a representation of two hands connecting which goes well with what the overall product is trying to achieve (helping two or more people connect).

Scoping and planning of the product

What Were My Learnings And Challenges Faced?

My Learnings

We can only increase the % of people turning up to the meeting and we cannot expect 100% of people to show ups in the meetings every time.

We need to apply some constraints to set the context right for creating calendars as every individual tends to use calendars differently.

How combining ideas created both effective and efficient results.

It is very important to create ideas that are more practical and feasible.

Challenges Faced

Understanding what type of categorization on the home screen makes sense and is easy to understand for the user.