Enhancing the experience of scheduling meetings for participants located in different time zones.
In Meetie project, our team explores the possibility of improving the experiences of scheduling meetings across different time zones.
We focus on enhancing time zone conversion for meeting hosts; assisting meeting hosts in selecting the most suitable meeting time when scheduling; makinig it easier for participants to select their preferred meeting time when choosing availability.
Time-consuming and Challenging Across Time Zones
We are three students from different time zones (Taiwan, Seattle, and New York). We discovered that scheduling meetings and converting time zones can be time-consuming and challenging when coordinating with people across different time zones.
Simplify the Meeting Scheduling Process
How might we identify the needs and pain points experienced by users when coordinating online meetings across different time zones and simplify the process?
Lack of Emotional Connection and Humanization
Online meetings often lack emotional connection and humanization. Drawing from our own experiences, we aim to create a system that enhances the scheduling process and fosters better connections across time zones.
We compare different scheduling tools, some excelling in team collaboration (Calendly, Doodle), others in shift scheduling (7Shifts), or general business use (Outlook, Zoom).
We ask about their previous experiences with scheduling meetings across different time zones, the purposes of the meetings, the tools they used, the most challenging aspects, and how they think the process could be improved to better support them.
Personas are based on different meeting purposes—business, school, and casual—across various time zones. We identify the situations and pain points they might encounter and defined the ideal experiences.
Douglas, a UX researcher, faces challenges scheduling international meetings due to time zone conversions and confirming participant responses. Improvements like time zone converting tools could streamline her process.
Through affinity mapping, we identified key challenges in Meeting Time and Communication.
1. Meeting Time: Issues included difficulty with time zone conversion, selecting times, and coordinating availability.
2. Communication: Participants emphasized polite messaging, generative AI templates, and fostering human connection.
Focusing on three parts: scheduling preparation, participant confirmation, finalization and confirmation. We started to generate some ideas and sketches.
Ideation #1
Showing others time when hovering allows users to check if the time makes sense.
Ideation #2
Using different colors to represent availability to make the time slots more intuitive.
Ideation #3
The time clock feature allows the host to double-check if the meeting time makes sense for all participants.
The user flow outlines the process for event scheduling and participant confirmation in five main steps: login/signup, event owner creates a vote, vote link creation, participants vote, finalization and confirmation.
We outline a system for event management, focusing on scheduling and transferring meeting time.
We choose “Twilight Horizon” as the main color, “Sunset Orange”, “Golden Hour”, “Midnight Blue” as secondary color. We use gradient colors to represent the transition between day and night, aiming to enhance the user’s impression of the passage of time.
Task: As a user interview participant, you are about to have a focus group interview with a company’s research team. Choose your available meeting time.
Goals:
Enhance human connection and foster genuine interactions, helping people feel they are meeting with real individuals.
Pain Points:
Emotions are inherent to humans, expressing the brain's inner workings. Research suggests that up to 93% of communication is nonverbal. When meeting online, people often feel a lack of emotion and connection, making it harder to sense they are engaging with real individuals
Goals:
Determine whether the meeting time is reasonable for all participants across different time zones.
Pain Points:
People scheduling meetings across different time zones often find it challenging to clearly communicate and convert times. They frequently get confused about which time zone they are selecting.
Addressing time zone challenges
As an international student, I often struggle with interpreting time zones accurately. This tool aims to simplify scheduling across time zones, making meetings easier to coordinate.
Enhancing connection
With the rise of virtual meetings post-COVID, emotional disconnect can be an issue. Our design promotes features that foster natural connection, reducing feelings of isolation.
Creating an inclusive, balanced experience
To avoid a host-centered dynamic, we focused on promoting inclusivity and balanced power dynamics, creating a more collaborative and friendly meeting environment.