Simplifying social meetups for young working adults

Project Overview

Project Brief
Andrew, our client, noticed that tech expats like himself tends to have a rich social life. His peers and him tend to reach out to others to hangout after work through drinks and parties. In his initial iteration to create a network of expats, he has identified the user persona as individuals who are very social, heavy users of Google Calendar to plan work and social schedules and unresponsive via text due to their individual schedules. Andrew hopes to create a platform where people like himself is able to manage their social schedules with friends.
Duration
4-5 weeks
Oct- Nov 2023
Goals
We dissected the information we had and derive 2 broad goals of this project (1) understand and define the scope for Social Calendar and (2) simplifying social scheduling for those between 25- 32 years old.
My Role
|| Conduct User Interviews
|| Synthesising Primary and Secondary Research
|| Analysing Design Patterns
|| Create lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes
Deliverables
User Research
Competitive Analysis
Hi-Fi Prototype

Kick-Off

Is there a need for a Social Scheduling Platform?

As this project was largely exploratory, the following were our main research objectives to validate the assumptions of the situation presented to us.

We had 2 main objectives as we embark on our research

  1. Analyse how social meetups are typically scheduled from the perspective of a host and a guest
    To validate the need for a social scheduling platform, we needed to understand how people currently plan their social meetups and whether it necessitates a digital solution.
  2. Discover the strengths and weakness of current scheduling platforms
    Based on the design brief presented to us, it seems that current platforms used for scheduling social meetups has fallen short. Hence, we wanted to validate this assumption and understand what are the areas these platforms have succeeded in and the areas which requires improvement.

Discovery

Social Scheduling and Privacy Concerns

We conducted user interviews to understand our users better. Apart from tech expats, we targeted busy young working adults and triangulate the common patterns.

As there were a number data we collated, we went through 2 rounds of affiinity mapping

Raw Data From User Interview
Insight 1
Users do not like to mix their work calendar with personal calendars.
Click on the illustration to view the exact excerpts from the User Interview
Most users tend to keep separate calendars for work and personal matters. Some also avoid referring to their work calendar over the weekends. Hence scheduling platforms designed for professionals are typically not used for social purposes.
Insight 2
To respond to invites for meetups, users tend to have to toggle between calendar applications, messaging apps and/or scheduling platforms.
Click on the illustration to view the exact excerpts from the User Interview
100% of the interviewees uses at least 1 digital platform while planning or responding to social invites. Invitations and coordination for social meetups are typically sent through messaging applications. To set a date, individuals have to cross-refer to their online personal calendars before responding on messaging applications.
Insight 3
Users desire having control of their privacy over the efficiency of scheduling meetups.
Click on the illustration to view the exact excerpts from the User Interview
Though interviewees agree that sharing calendars is a more efficient way of scheduling, many are not keen to share their personal calendars with friends. Most would only share with an intimate group of friends or their partners.
Insight 4
The 2 main ways ways users schedule their meetups are (a) Fixed Date, (b) Agreeing on a Common Time Slot. The latter requires more coordination and time.
Swipe to see the common user story when agreeing on a time slot
Fixed date meetups are typically scheduled among big group meetups in which full attendance is not expected by the host. Meetups that scheduled based on common time slots tend to be within smaller group of friends in which the presence of everyone is important. Typically, such meetups will involves a lot of back and forth in proposing time slots for everyone’s approval and can be scheduled 1 month before.

Synthesis

Going beyond the surface

Alongside, we conducted competitor analysis on the following competitor applications to tease out gaps and opportunities. We discovered that there are various aspects to scheduling and following listed are the key functions which help us to what products is available in the market.

Competitors in the market

We synthesised both the user interviews and competitor analysis and derived the following insights

The Challenge

A scheduling platform for mingling

We knew that there was not product in the market currently for people to schedule their social meetups. Current scheduling platforms are deemed to be too professional and sharing the calendar was considered too private. It seems as though there is a dilemma between wanting to connect without breaching certain private affairs (or perhaps confidential).

We also had to consider the different aspects to designing for scheduling in the aspect of social meetups.

This prompts us to ask

How might we design a web-based platform that allows for an easy, smooth and convenient scheduling and responding to social meetups?

Design Features

Making social scheduling easy, smooth and convenient?

Let's Hang was designed with 2 main flows in mind.

Feature
1

Fixed Date Gathering

Throw a date and see who turns up

For hosts who are throwing a party, baby shower or housewarming party which they have catered a date for.

Host

[Host] Initiating a housewarming party on 5 Nov

Guest
Host

[Host] Checking responses

Feature
2

Find Common Availabilities

Let's meet when its good for everyone

Hosting a school gathering with your high school friends? Check when everyone is free and go ahead with the best date!

Host

[Host] Initiating a housewarming party on 5 Nov

[Guest] Responding to invite

Guest
Host

[Host] Checking responses

Impact

Users were mostly satisfied with the prototype and found it easy to use.

As platform was still at the initial discovery phase, we were not able to test the launch product. Instead, we proceeded with our figma prototype

About 60% of the users found the platform easy to use at first interaction and more than 80% were satisfied with the platform.

While the results looks promising, there remains a concern about the actual adoption of the platform. Most users cited the condition of having their friend groups to adopt the platform for it to work.

Future Prospects

The successful takeoff for the platform will conceivably increase with more time spent on

Research on Desirability

Little is made known about the desirability of social scheduling platforms. While the sentiments regarding adopting a new platform was positive during the stage of discovery, it is met with mixed reactions during Usability Tests 1 and 2

Integrations with other platforms

Integrating with commonly used platforms may reduce user friction from having to adopt a completely new platform.

Mobile Responsiveness

As most social scheduling takes place on mobile devices, having a mobile responsive platform will ease the entire process of scheduling especially on the go and while away from a desktop device.

Design Process

Building the foundations

Going back to what we know

Looking back at our affinity map, we began to identify the pain points and asked ourselves what makes the planning for social meetup ideal.

As many have acknowledged that planning social gathering will involve quite a fair bit of effort, we asked ourselves

How can we make scheduling within friend groups easier?

We started to look at the an individual preference, possible circumstances each person might be in and the scenarios that may happen to the host and guest both individually and collectively.

We further streamline the process and prioritised the essential actionable insights for our MVP.  

Deciding Factor: Shifting from group size to the type of initiation

From there, we plotted the userflows for both the host and guest.

Userflow Ver. 1: Group Size as the deciding factor

In the midst of the process, we discovered professional scheduling sites tend to prioritise 1:1 scheduling and group poll. However in the case of social meetups, we noticed Fixed Dates Meetups and Flexible Date Meetups tend to be the common trend.

Userflow Ver. 2: Type of initiation as the deciding factor

We then replaced 1:1 and Group Poll Hangout types with

  • Fixed Date
    For host who have already decided on a date and prefer to cut the chase
  • Poll
    For individuals who are intending to maximise turnout of guests
  • Common Timeslots
    For close friends to spontaneously initiate a meetup
Starting from what has worked - Design Patterns

We looked at how different scheduling platforms are designed and what are the best practices that we could implement on our design.

Design Pattern Analysis
Based on 5 platforms

From the analysis, we teased out 3 main observations which guided our design process.

Emphasis on Key Decision items
As there are a number decision items for scheduling and there tends to be a lot of numbers around (date and time) hence, there is a need to make selected dates and timings stand out. Such information are also key in event planning.
Main CTA are displayed prominently
The main CTA tends to appear on the right hand side of the screen. It is possible that after filling a number of fields, it my exhaust a significant amount of cognitive energy. Hence, the final key step of “saving” is made prominent.
Short and succinct instructions is used whenever possible
Commonly known fields such as date and time tend to be replaced by associated icons, possibly to reduce the word count on screen. Less known functions and fields may require additional explanation for first time usage hence it is hard to make these instructions short. Hence, some platforms tend to provide the explanations but in a lighter choice of font colour.
From Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi Prototypes

As the research team continue to refine the user flow, the design embark on lo-fi prototypes of the MVP. We sketched the following based on the initial user flow.

With time, there was more clarity as to how the platform should look like

Usability Test: What are the thoughts about using a social scheduling platform

We went through 2 rounds of usability testing with the aim of finding out the (1) ease of use, (2) desirability and (3) user satisfaction of the platform. After the first usability test, we refined our prototype before pushing out for a final test.

qualitative Metrics
quantitative Metrics
  • Overall ease of task completion and satisfaction
  • Performance as compared to existing products
  • Desirability to replace existing products with this new product
  • Likelihood of using this product again
  • Rating of ease of use and satisfaction on a Likert scale
  • Progress of Task Completion

The results from the first usability test are as follows

Insights from Usability Test 1

We continue iterating on prototype. By the end of the second usability test, we found that while most scores remain favourable, the desirability scores were not the best.

The ease of usage is inevitably dependent on user adoption.

Many users cited that the platform will only be useful if their friends uses it. This brings us back to the need for further research on desirability and feasibility to integrate with well used applications.

Retrospect

The need for continuous iteration

This project has given me a taster of how the discover phase is essential for new products or solutions. There was little products available for the need of social scheduling. Hence, we spent bulk of our time interviewing those from our target audience.

There was also a number of times we had to relook at our research to go further. We found ourselves finding more trends each time we look back. At the same time we had to decide that we had sufficient to progress given the timeline.

From Andrew Oh (Social City)
The MVP designs were well-researched and validated to a certain extent through extensive user interviews and usability testing.
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