A new feature in Slack that helps you schedule meetings with your team
My Role
- UX Design: Storyboard, Interaction Design
- UX Research: User Testing, Interviews, Competitive Analysis
- The Decider: Execute Decisions
Project Context
- Team: 6 Designers
- Summer 2022 – 3 week Design Sprint
- Design Project
Tools
- Figma
- FigJam
- Zoom
Project Overview
I created a new feature in a messaging app through a Sprint process, which outlines how to solve big problems and test new ideas in a short period of time. It groups tasks together by day: Mon- Fri. Using Sprint, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz, I developed a Sprint of my own within a group. I designed a new feature in Slack, the messaging app, to organize individual availabilities and schedule meetings. We used FigJam to complete our journey and mark our progress. A prototype was created in Figma.
On my team, we created a presentation slideshow to explain our design for our new feature in Slack, The Scheduler. We guided the audience through the problem we aimed to tackle, our proposed solution, and a detailed walk through of our design sprint to land at our final product. I took the lead on the interviews, along with another designer. We set up online interviews to research users’ perceptions on this new feature and analyzed our findings into probable solutions for our team to focus on for a potential redesign.
The Challenge
A common challenge for students using Slack is finding time to meet for group projects. The process involves several steps:
- Contacting group members
- Waiting for them to respond with their availability
- Picking a time that works for everyone
- Scheduling the meeting
How do we streamline this process, especially in the world of remote learning?
The Solution
The Scheduler: Using an automated process to schedule group meetings using the “Slackbot”
With a new scheduling feature,
- How do we make it easily visualized (colors and formatting) without becoming cluttered or overwhelming on the overlapping times when people can meet?
- How can we ensure that everyone in a group will input their schedules?
- How will this Slack feature/extension have a competitive advantage over other similar apps?
The Design Process
Define
Long-term goal: We want to design a user friendly feature to Slack that enables fast and easy scheduling information sharing.
The Agile project is broken down into a number of sprints, each sprint taking the project closer to completion. Following the sprint guidelines, we developed a thoughtfully ideated, researched, and tested product. We interviewed a variety of people for input on our long term goal and sprint questions, which included NMI professors, emerging media students, and business professionals. As a team, we developed “how might we” (HMW) questions during each interview session and organized them into 6 related categories: Slack Interface, Marketing, UX/UI, CX, Competitive Advantage, Misc. These questions address our concerns with the project and involve our broad ideas and visions for the feature. At this early stage in development, we are organizing our thoughts and creating a direction for the design. Using 6 separate users, we each mapped out a journey map of each user experience, mine being the business professional. We developed a sprint map to guide the rest of our process.
Sprint Map: The circles on the map represent the important targets that I chose for our project, as the decider. The group member is our target customer, as we concluded everyone in Slack is considered a group member before someone takes charge as a group leader. The two target events are when 1, the group member has to physically schedule a meeting time, and 2, when the group member waits for an unpredictable amount of time while everyone’s availability is being organized to set an official meeting time.
Ideate
We each created lightning demos to show off inspiring products and experiences. Then, we each designed a solution sketch, including three panels of the user experience we envision for this product. It acted as a mini storyboard. Evaluating each sketch, we voted the best of those ideas. This created a heat map of different colored votes. As the decider, I had the ultimate decision for which ideas to incorporate into our final prototype. I took my position with integrity and used my power of “super voting” on the ideas which seemed to be at the crossroads of most popular, practical, and beneficial for the Scheduler. Looking at the array of colorful dots on the heat maps, our team decided to steer away from an all-in-one approach and rumble with streaks of genius found throughout multiple members’ sketches. I individually created a lightning demo of ideas from similar products, designed a solution sketch of only 3 panels to demonstrate the new feature’s use, reviewed others’ sketches, commented on parts that stood out to me, and sketched the final storyboards.
Design
We decided on the final storyboard that would carry over into the prototype.
Storyboard
Using Figma, we transferred the storyboard into a functioning prototype. Transforming the storyboard into a real prototype presented some issues as we laid out the user experience and mapped out the user journey. As we have been designing the scheduling feature for weeks, the idea seems crystal clear to us, but for a new user, everything about the feature – its purpose, its functions, and multiple uses – need to be explained. The additional explanatory information created more steps in the process. With the fully developed prototype, we turned to those with varying degrees of experience with Slack and interviewed them to research their initial interactions and reactions with the scheduling feature.
Evaluate
I conducted user testing along with another peer. We interviewed 5 different people of diverse backgrounds and experience with Slack. During the interview, we would share our screen to demonstrate the prototype. We focused on how users responding to the following:
- Learn More/ Schedule Start Page
- Scheduling a Meeting
- My Schedule
- Red/ Green Clock
- Group Schedule
Interview Notes Chart
The notes from the interviews are organized into the chart, with color-coordinating sticky notes, which indicate the user’s response. From 8 key questions, notes were recorded and condensed into brief comments, recorded on the notes. The red indicates a negative comment, yellow a neutral comment, and green as a positive comment. The visual created easily indicates where any difficulty occurs. With the higher frequency of red and yellow notes for one question, there is a string indication of an issue in the product. After reviewing the notes, and interview recordings, I analyzed our findings and created solutions.
Results
We believe the Scheduler has great potential to solve the issue of organizing group schedules and creating meetings within Slack. With a few adjustments, and more testing, the prototype may become a reality.
To answer our sprint questions:
- [Sprint question #1] – How do we make the scheduler easily visualized without becoming cluttered and overwhelming?
- The Scheduler appears on the left hand side tool bar where the channels are located. It is formatted to fit in with the existing appearance.
- [Sprint question #2] – How can we ensure that everyone in a group will input their schedules?
- The Slackbot facilitator takes responsibility to message those who have not responded. It will send out notifications as well as messages to the group of what should occur next in the scheduling process.
- [Sprint question #3] – How will this Slack feature/extension have a competitive advantage over other similar apps?
- The scheduler has an advantage over others for users who use slack, because this feature will be closer to use and built within the slack system, creating more convenience than other similar apps.
We can reach our long-term goal of creating a user-friendly feature to Slack to enable fast and easy scheduling information sharing by making adjustments to our prototype and continuing with user research, then launching the new feature in Slack. I believe we would need another Sprint to build an improved prototype. We would need to learn how to make the initial interaction of the new feature with users more clear, with steps explained at each part and displayed more prominently, as well as with necessary definitions.
Big takeaway: Agile sprints help organize the design process of a new product, assisting teams to address their goals and values, test their ideas, and build better products faster.
The Sprint
I added value to the project by taking responsibility as The Decider, analyzing group feedback and overall goals to execute decisions. I ideated and sketched much of the storyboard, which guided the final product. I also conducted user research, analyzed all notes and recordings, and synthesized qualitative data to gather all significant insights and proposed solutions for the product’s usability issues.
Deliverables: a prototype of The Scheduler feature in Figma along with a presentation explaining our Sprint process