6A – Blog Post

Timeframes is a web application for scheduling group meetings.

Our value proposition is making the scheduling process for group meetings painless, fast and engaging.

Our value proposition is targeting pain points that came up in all of our needfinding interviews. This is evidence that the product we are proposing is needed by our customer target group. The process of scheduling a meeting can feel very painful as some people take forever to respond or it takes a lot of follow ups before all availabilities have been collected. This makes the process time consuming and slow. Additionally, not all attendees are invested in the scheduling process as it does not feel interesting or engaging in any way. It simply feels like a lot of administrative work.

For the MVP we are building a clickable Figma prototype of one of the features within our scheduling process. The flow would be – Set up an event, provide times, share final meeting time. The engaging nature of our reminder function, a subtask of the “provide times” step, will be our main differentiator over competitive products. Because we want to find out whether this is enough differentiation, we will test it within our MVP.

It is our mission to save our users time and mental effort when scheduling. We want to make them enjoy the process through the motivational UI elements that we create, such as the “horserace” progress bar and the small animations (analogous to the Asana unicorn) when a task is finished to celebrate their efforts for scheduling meetings.

Assumptions that we are worried about are the integration of our web app with a messenger app and calendar integration. We imagine pushing notifications to the group chat whenever someone has successfully provided availability and making the progress of providing times as fast and easy as possible by gaining access and retrieving free times from calendar apps such as Google Calendar and Outlook.

Main Assumptions:

1. Schedulers find value in reminders and are willing to set up a tool that sends reminders to their group and is engaging 
2. Team members, also known as responders, tolerate reminders and respond more quickly when receiving reminders.
3. Schedulers and responders are willing to input times and rank meetings
4. Schedulers and responders don’t want others seeing their schedules
5. Games and rewards improve the scheduling experience 

 

5 prototypes to test assumptions:

Test Card – Assumption 1 Schedulers find value in reminders.
We believe that	Schedulers find value in reminders and are willing to set up a tool that sends reminders to their group
To verify that we will	Set up a basic Google form asking “schedulers” to fill in their availability, deadline for people to respond by, whether or not they would be okay with us sending constant reminders to their group and how they would want to share the availability form with their group
And measure	If “schedulers” are comfortable and find value in sending reminders to their group
We are right if	They answer that they would be okay with sharing this with their group despite knowing the fact that we will be sending reminders to their group

 

Test Card – Assumption 2 Responders respond more quickly when receiving reminders.
We believe that	Responders will respond more rapidly when sent regular reminders to complete a request to schedule a meeting. We also assume that these reminders will not negatively impact their experience.
To verify that we will	Create a group chat among team members and send a meeting inquiry form. We will send regular reminders to the group until all members have completed the form.
And measure	We will evaluate how quickly the respondents share their preferred times in the inquiry form and their attitude towards the reminders.
We are right if	Responders complete the form in under 2 days, our working estimate of the average time to schedule, and have a positive assessment of the reminders.

 

Test Card – Assumption 3 Users are willing to input times and rank meetings
We believe that	Users are willing to spend time to rank their times to indicate priorities
To verify that we will	Provide participants with two versions of the app Including the ranking step Excluding the ranking step
And measure	Questions if the added effort was worth the time for them
We are right if	The majority indicates that there is added benefit in the time ranking feature

 

Test Card – Assumption 4 Users don’t want people to see their schedules
We believe that	Users do not want their schedule to be shared in its entirety with the rest of their team members
To verify that we will	Ask our participant to fill out their schedule on a form and then proceed with one of two options: either show a message with the participant’s calendar fully visible or one with no calendar shown to others. We will then ask for feedback on the format of the message from the participant.
And measure	How much they like the format on a skill from 1 to 5. What qualitative feelings they have about the experience. How many positive/negative comments we get.
We are right if	A format with a calendar shown gets more negative feedback and a lower score than the alternative.

 

Test Card – Assumption 5 Games or rewards improve the scheduling experience
We believe that	A gamification element will add value to the scheduler app
To verify that we will	Give users three options to test:  No game elements progress bar with where everyone is in the progress animation to celebrate small successes like inputting times and meeting time found
And measure	The joy of usage – click dummy and consecutive  UEQ questionnaire
We are right if	The UEQ results show

 

We tested assumption 1 by setting up a basic Google form asking “schedulers” to fill in their availability, deadline for people to respond by, whether or not they want to send constant reminders to their group and how they want to share the availability form with their group. 

We learned that :

• A robust form is too formal for a small group meeting, especially when groups are already familiar with each other
• Users would not use a form in the highly time-sensitive situations that require reminders
• Time selection needs to be more granular

So we will:

• Design a new prototype to test only the reminder aspect of assumption 1; without the medium (Google Forms) coming into the way
• Allow users to choose their own reminder cadence 
• Try subtle, less intrusive reminders

 

From what we have learned over the past couple of weeks, our project idea is viable. There is a definite user need for what we are proposing, and the interviewees seemed open to trying a new web app for scheduling that they are directed to via a link in a group chat. Striking the right balance between engaging users via motivational UIs and keeping the app low effort at the same time, will however make or break our project and we need to be able to crack the code to that.

 

Questions to reviewers:

• Is testing the motivational aspect of our app the right focus at this step in the process?
• Which fidelity should we achieve when showing mock UIs to interviewees?
• How can we make money with a free online scheduling app?
• What – if any – are ethical business models around monetizing user data that we might consider?

 

VPC

 

BMC

Madlib’d Value Proposition Statement

We believe that people like university students with recurring group meetings have a need for a meeting planning tool which reminds them to fill in their availability and semi-automatically schedules a meeting for them. We will know we have validated this when we see faster meeting scheduling times and greater user satisfaction from people who are using our application.

Comparative Research Findings

Participatory Roadmap

User Story Map

 

Assumptions Map

Experience Prototype