ROLE

Lead designer— UX, testing, interaction, prototyping

TEAM

1 designer (me)

This case study is:

1. Lengthy–might take atleast 20-25m of your time to read.
2. Optimised for viewing on large screens. It may not look good on mobile.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Basically,

Nikita is a product manager at Brella. he's working on a new project with the UX, content and engineering teams.

he needs to review a feature with the team, so he decides to setup her online meeting using whereby meetings. However, he finds it very difficult.

Whereby meeting doesn’t allow him to schedule meeting without installing a seprate extension in chrome browser. The current scheduling flow is very complicated for Nikita’s meeting. .

Being a diehard safari user, he also finds it difficult to switch to chrome. **he feels incredibly frustrated and Powerless.

Upon a co-worker’s suggestion, She decides to copy her meeting room and link and paste it create her meeting with outlook on web. She finds this method much more user-friendly and useful where she is able to share her whereby room link without installing an extension.

From that day onwards, She used same trick to schedule and manage her calendar. She organized all her meetings happily ever after.

Insights after conversation with 20 active user of whereby meetings.

Everyone, literally.

1. Framing the problem

<aside> 💭 Along with Nikita , a large chunk of users were preferring this method over Current scheduling flow of Whereby Meetings. Why ?

</aside>

1. Fundamentally bad user experience: The old meeting scheduling flow requires seprate extension installation for both outlook and calendar. There is no way to schedule meeting without extensions in whereby unlike people copy and paste there whereby room link in outlook seprately.

   Whereby is built for simplicity, we can start meetings in seconds, right in our browser. But when a user want to schedule the meeting they have to navigate through an external route of custom installation for each third party application which induced friction and hinders usability.To put it simply, the process makes the meeting a hassle before it even starts.

2. Mental model mismatch: Imagine the ability to see wonderful things with your eyes, but not have the ability to describe it for someone else. Using Outlook and Calendar meant you got that ability. Naturally, When it comes to scheduling many Whereby users flocked the current scheduling flow for a combination of reasons:

   1. Familiarity: Whereby was not only new, it was different. Many of the past design decisions led to Whereby having a new but unfamiliar design which didn't really align with other scheduling experiences. This was both in terms of interface as well as behaviour. Being most familiar with Outlook's and Calendar’s design, most users just preferred it to something new.
   2. Flexibility: Outlook also had a robust mobile calendar experience which had almost all if not more functionality than its desktop counterpart. This was a huge reason for mobile-only users to prefer the Outlook experience. Meanwhile, Default mobile whereby scheduling experience was equally plain as the desktop counterpart, so that didn't do much in retention.

3. Strong verbatim from research studies:

   Early qualitative research and telemetry indicated an alarming 80% drop-off from the current scheduling flow. From qualitative research, most users confirmed that upon realising that Whereby scheduling flow doesn't offer many of the functionality offered by Outlook and Calendar, they preferred to complete their scheduling task there.

   Hell, even I was using Outlook to schedule meetings to discuss how to improve Whereby scheduling!

2. Identifying the opportunity