PROBLEM
The problems that event organizers and invitees face:
- To schedule an event, organizers have to check every invitee's calendar to look for free times and then schedule an event.
- Invitees are not open to sharing their personal or work calendars with organizers of different events due to the use of highly sensitive or classified information.
Why is this a problem?
There is a considerable amount of time taken to schedule an event due to the above problems. In addition to this, privacy of calendar data is a must in a military use case due to potential classified information access.
SOLUTION
We designed a mobile application that solves these problems. We call it Evently. This mobile app provides organizers the ability to schedule an event that would occur during a tentative date and time range by securely pulling in calendar data of each invitee.
MAIN FEATURES
Voting on Events
Once a user logs in, all events are visible comprising of events that are yet to be voted on, events that are pending and events that are scheduled. The date and realtime number of attendees are also available to the user.
Creating Tentative Events
Event organizers can create an event by specifying a tentative date range and time range. Invitees will see the tentative ranges and choose to attend or not. Based on common availability, a timeframe is automatically selected for scheduling the event.
Linking to Preferred Calendar
Once an event is finally scheduled by the app, invitees can choose to add it to their preferred calendar. This way the event lives on a platform they are comfortable using.
PROCESS
Previous Research and Design
This project began with us visiting some of the older designs for this application and conducting think-alouds with them. We discovered different usability issues with the older designs.
- Events disappear as soon as they have been created and only resurface once every invitee responds.
- Event details appear in the notification making it easy to view privacy sensitive data without logging in.
- Ability to "Add to Calendar" is only during the event notification which can be missed easily.
Paper Prototyping
Moving ahead, we created low fidelity prototypes on a whiteboard to ideate different features of the app. This helped us come up with 2 major high fidelity "paper" versions of the application that differed based on how the time-slots were selected.
A/B Testing
To find out which of the two versions performed better and was preferred by users, we conducted a round of A/B testing on the two versions. This led us to move ahead with version A that was preferred by users.
VERSION A - SETTING TIMEs MANUALLY
VERSION B - CHOOSING A TIMESLOT
High Fidelity Screens
Using the results of the A/B test, we designed the high fidelity solution. We changed the color scheme to improve contrast between text and background along with increasing affordance for the Call-to-Actions.
OVERALL REFLECTION
My experience working on this project was great. This project helped me realize the importance of maintaining privacy of user data. The ability to design effective solutions while taking data privacy into consideration is one of my biggest takeaways. Additionally, working on redesigning a previously built app, helped me understand how small visual element changes can bring about a great difference in the overall user experience.
