Process

Pain Points

I conducted interviews with people from different time zones to understand their thoughts and current methods when choosing a time for a matching schedule. After speaking to people, discovered that it wasn’t an effortless process for these participants to organise a time together because people generally do not have matching available time. The common pain points noted are:

• Calculating the time differences.
• Aligned availability for all people involved.

During the time of this project, all participants were using mobile phones with different applications as their current method to communicate and organise time with people.

“It’s tricky to do group conversations over multiple timezones, I Google the timezones.” – Health care worker, UK.

Common Experiences

I learned about people’s experiences and their motivation to stay connected. Interviewed participants shared their experiences of time difference and geographical limitations. Digging a little deeper through conversations, I wanted to learn more about each individual’s step-by-step methods and their thoughts when organising a time. With each individual experiences recorded on a spreadsheet, the most common go-to steps were noted. The following reflects the participant’s common current experience when they have organised a catchup:

1. Pick a date and/or time.
2. Convert time differences (Mind, Google, clock app, internet search).
3. Confirm with all people involved (Text message, voice message, call conversation, social media and email).
4. Otherwise repeat steps 1 and 3.
5. If a change of plan occurs, plan is rescheduled or canceled.
6. Repeat steps 1 to 3.

“I calculate the time difference in my head and use mobile to communicate back and forth to arrange for a schedule.” – Graduate, Australia.

 

“I check for both mine and their schedule, I use calendar plus alarm as a reminder.” – Australian living abroad, China.

Defining the problem

People want to conveniently schedule a time together because they often consider time difference and availability when organising a matching time.

How Might We

How Might We…

• Help users eliminate manual calculation of time difference?
• Filter out unavailable schedules to reduce the effort of learning of each others availability?
• Reduce repetition in users steps to organise a schedule?

Affinity Mapping

People want to conveniently schedule a time together because they often consider time difference and availability when organising a matching time.

Developing Ideas

After developing a Persona and Storyboard, I loosely sketched out 8 best and worst possible ideas. Some ideas that were worth concepting include:

• Time differences being easy to identify visually.
• Safe times to schedule a get-together. Safe times may include wake times or during parts of the day, outside of commitments such as work and family.
• Comparing schedules.

Feature prioritisation

Initial key screen

Userflow

First Prototype

Results and findings

A combination of users from previous interview and fresh minds were asked to try the first paper prototype mimicking the app. Two versions of key screens were A/B tested. Participants understood concept B better because there were less uncertainties in what each elements represented. Findings of the prototype testing showed that an iteration is already required to eliminate ambiguity such as:

• Not understanding ‘Last Question’ screen which resulted in pressing “Later” button.
• The top part of the screen mislead user to think it was showing the weather.
• A questionable “M” and “W” without clarity in what the letters stand for.

Iteration

As a result from findings, the key screen was iterated trying to address all ambiguous points and borrowing the best of concepts A and B. The middle screen bar was widened to help users intuitively pan across the screen and see time blocks.

Sitemap

A sitemap hierarchy was arranged from card sorting.

Second prototype

A second paper prototype was created and tested with the following studies:

• How well did users understand all content and information displayed?
• Is the User Interface clear and layout intuitive? Is this easy to pick up?
• An additional screen was introduced to block out time as a filter for key screen.

Is this helpful? Will this save time?

Results and Findings

Unfortunately we couldn’t get fresh minds during this around and had some previous interview participants to test. Participants found the second prototype clearer to understand and blocking out time did made sense.

UI Design on Sketch

Usability test questions

• Demonstrate how you will add your friends timezone.
• Set/highlight your free times of the week.
• How would you go about comparing your time difference to a friend from another city?
• How would you organise a group catchup?
• How would you go about comparing equivalent time zones with multiple friends?
• Show me how you would change the settings of your current default time zone?
• Share your schedule to your friends.

Possible solution

Effortless scheduling

When users shared their step by step methods to organising a schedule. There was common pattern of repetition of choosing a date and time, confirming with the other person and repeat until both sides can agree. A possible solution was for users to preallocate their free time in advance, then share their availabilities to people involved to minimise repetition and back and forth communication.

During the prototype test, I ask users to set their free time and let ‘Catchup’ app do the rest of the work. Timelines are tailored to display users free time and only showing necessary information to block a schedule.

InVision prototype

For first time app users, ‘Catchup’ prompts to set current timezone and any possible free schedules of the week. This initial setup preallocates user’s free time. As a result, this saves an extra step to make scheduling InVision clear.

A brief tutorial explains how to navigate the main dashboard. From here, user’s can add timezone, see time differences and highlight preferred times to share their schedule. Any changes can always be updated in settings at the bottom of dashboard.

See it all at glance

Time difference is one of the main factors taken into consideration when organising for a call session. Interviewed participants calculate by mind, search the internet or use a world time clock. By having time difference displayed all in one place, this can reduce the effort of working out different timezones and reduce repetitive steps. The example below shows different timezones can be added and compared with local timezone.

Share intuitively

‘Catchup’ needs to be intuitive and cater to mobile users wanting to communicate with people living abroad. The criteria for UI needs to be visually clean with only necessary buttons for clarity. There should be visual feedback from a button press, subtle animation from gestures during a left or right screen pan and when moving into different sitemap hierarchies. The prototype below shows the instance of sharing a schedule. The sharing schedule function only appears when the criteria logic is met – only when a free time block is already highlighted.

Usability Test

Feedback from usability tests:

• Initial prompts to setting timezone and highlighting free schedule was consistently easy to understand.
• Dashboard may need visual/gestural feedback to show updated times and reflect the app design. Some participants had pause for a moment to understand what feedback was given as they screen panned left and right.
• The options under Settings initially had confusing names where users weren’t clear what the setting options meant. This has now been addressed and updated after feedback.

Plus/Delta columns

Try the prototype

Click below to interact with the prototype: