The Empathy Meeting Scheduler

Overview

Scheduling meetings at work can be a nightmare. We've all been there: endless back-and-forth proposed new times, time zone confusion, and the dreaded double-bookings that throw your day into chaos. It's enough to make you want to bang your head against the keyboard. But fear not, The Empathy Meeting Scheduler Slack app tackles these challenges head-on! It is a Slack app that allows users to schedule meetings via Google Calendar. The empathetic algorithm notifies and prevents users from scheduling meetings in undesirable situations like lunch time, outside of normal work hours, and back-to-back meetings without breaks.

Context

In March of 2022, Dotdash Meredith hosted an internal hackathon with theme of improving collaboration at work. I had been observing and experience a shared pain: scheduling meetings. It can be frustrating when you get meetings scheduled at your lunch break, at 6 AM your local time, or at the only 30 minute break in the entire day. I understood that nobody intentionally wanted to put their coworkers in such circumstances, so I started envisioning ways that technology can help us schedule meetings with more empathy. I recruited a team of front-end and back-end engineers, and a graphic designer to work with me. In the span of one week, we created a proof-of-concept of the Empathy Meeting Scheduler.

Process

Since we only had a few days to work on this project, I decided that we should build out a few very specific use cases of the app. I started by designing a default/startup interface, and then defined two scenarios: 1) scheduling meetings that contribute to meeting time exceeding 4 hours, and 2) scheduling meetings that is outside of normal work hours based on attendee’s timezone. My engineering partners took the design and built the app in a disposable sandbox.

• I designed the interface to match other calendar Slack apps that users are already familiar of, enabling quick and easy product adoption.
• Considering that users tend to have back to back meetings, I designed all meetings to be scheduled 5 minutes “late”, giving attendees some extra time to finish up their previous meetings and/or  have a short break.

• The app is set to considers 4 hours the max an attendee should have for meetings per day. If the new meeting request will make it over 4 hours that day, the app will suggest the user to reschedule the meetings on the next available day.
• Users should be able to set a max meeting hours. (Nice-to-have feature for future iterations)

• If users try to schedule a meeting outside of normal work hours in their attendee’s timezone, the app will let them know and suggest the best hours that work for the both of you in your timezone.
• Users should be able to set their work hours in their calendar app.

Outcome

The project was crowd favorite and we won “Best Potential Impact to help us with Working Together”. This app did not get built out, however, I started seeing people baking 5 minutes break before or after their meetings!

Learning

Designer as the leader

The recruiting process of the hackathon was project/idea driven: you put your idea out there, and people can sign up for what interests them. When I got my entire team put together, I realized I was the freshest meat, I didn’t know anyone on my team, and I didn’t have a good understanding of how a Slack App is built. We only had one week, and I knew imposter syndrome wouldn’t help. I kicked off the project with ice breaking games, helping my team get to know each other and learning about what they wanted to get out of this project. Then I delegated the engineering leadership effort to the experts on the team. Lastly, I made sure that everyone knew that I was here to support them and that we were here to have a good time!