ServiceTitan Calendar App

Carolyn leads sales and business development for a Fortune 500 company. She travels three out of four weeks in the month, and when she travels, it’s almost always internationally. Between all her travel to different time zones and a busy meeting schedule in different cities, she finds it challenging to keep up with her calendar to show in the right placed at the right time.

Design a calendar flow and interface that is smart to suggest meeting times, accounts for changing time zones, and is proactively working for Carolyn to make sure is always on time for her meetings.

Max time: 4 hours

 
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Where to start?

With such a short time of four hours to design a flow and interface, I had little to no time to go through a full design process. I had to budget my time wisely. Since I use calendar apps myself, I can use my own experiences to build empathy and self-survey. Less time can be put into empathizing and researching and put more time into ideating and executing.

These are the key goals that I wanted to tackle:

  1. Design a calendar app that can be processed at a glance

  2. Make it easy and convenient for the user to manage time zones

  3. Get the user to their events and meetings on time

 
 

User Flow

 
 

Calendar View

 

My main objective for the home screen was to present content in a streamlined manner to allow the user to digest information more easily. After doing a competitive analysis on some of the popular calendar apps on the market, I opted for a full calendar view with an agenda list. It’s a ubiquitous UI that almost every calendar and planner app user is familiar with. Also, this works well with both desktop and mobile. (If given more time, I would implemented a feature to allow the user to switch to other types of views such as weekly view, 3-day vew, daily view, schedule view, etc.)

I implemented a few UI and functionality features to the app to help the user with time management and keep them informed of their schedule. First and foremost, their next event/meeting will be shown prominently in-app, which can be snoozed or dismissed. Also they will be informed outside of the app via system notifications. Other pieces of content that are shown are times with time zones (8:00 am PST), time until event (18h away), and locations (Los Angeles). By using time until event, it gives the user an exact timeframe until the event, and not having to rely on the scheduled time with time zone to have them do the guesswork of how much time is left.

 
 

New Event

 

When creating a new event, I wanted to make it simple for the user to create an event with minimal amount of interaction or adjustments. By pre-populating the time zone and location to where the user is at during the time of creating the event, my hope is that persistent use of the app will train and encourage the user to make use of these attributes in practice. Also, if their settings are set to default a notification for new events, it’ll pre-populate to that set notification (e.g. 1 day before, 1 hour before). This notification setting, along with the pre-populating attributes to new events can be customized in the settings, if the user so chooses.

The whole idea is to make creating a new event as straightforward as possible and have the app do all the guesswork for the user.

 
 

Time Zone

 

Along with pre-populating attributes on the New Event UI, I also wanted to make it convenient for the user to make changes to the time zone or location. If the user opts to change the time zone or location, they’ll be presented this search UI where they can type in a country or time zone, then relevant results will surface where they can select the appropriate time zone. Also, recent and frequent time zones and locations are presented before a search. This gives the user instant selection of their desired time zone. Again, this all goes to my ultimate goal of encouraging the user to make use of these time zone and location attributes.

 
 

What’s Next?

So given the short amount of time to complete this challenge, there’s plenty of things I wanted to do with this calendar app: being able to go through a full design process. More researching and surveying, more time to ideate and come up with different options for flows. Prototype the entire flow and user test.

Getting into more specifics: I wanted to see the degrees of usability the other calendar views can be (weekly view, daily view etc.) and explore more ways of how the agenda is presented.