Meetable: Uncomplicating Group Meetups

Product Design | Designing for Seamless Social Coordination

Coordination is a time and effort consuming task. The workload of coordination between a group of people grows exponentially. Meetable aims to save people’s time and effort to set up a group meetup. Meetable tries to make every step of group meetups easier and more efficient. It supports meetups planning, coordination, preparation and notification. It also allows people to share pictures of happy memories after the meetups.

See prototype

Challenge

Group meetups typically involve significant time and effort due to back-and-forth communication and frequent misunderstandings

Goal

Meetable's aim is to simplify and enhance the efficiency of group meetup coordination

Role

End-to-end app design, from user research and ideation to prototyping, usability, and accessibility

Timeline

April 2023-July 2023

User Centered Design Process

1. Understanding the Users

• User Research
• Personas and Scenarios
• Competitive Audit
• Ideation

2. Initial the Design

• Paper and Digital Wireframes
• Low Fidelity Prototype
• Heuristics Evaluation of Lo-fi Prototype

3. Refining the Design

• Mockups
• High Fidelity Prototype
• Usability Test
• Accessibility Consideration

4. Going Forward

• Takeaways
• Next Steps

1. Understanding the Users

User Research

Interviews have been taken to understand users’ pain points and needs. All interviewees showed they were headache with the coordination work which is quite time and effort consuming. Basically, preliminary coordination before the meetup is usually the most labor-intensive. Coordinator needs to collect group members’ thoughts and availabilities then find a solution that best meets the needs of the largest number of the group. So based on the feedback through research, collecting groups’ preferences and availabilities is the difficulty and focus of the app.

Personas and Scenarios

Competitive Audit

Ideation

2. Initial the Design

Paper and Digital Wireframes

Low Fidelity Prototype

Heuristics Evaluation of Lo-fi Prototype

3. Refining the Design

Mockups

Usability Test

Parameters of Usability Study:
Study type: Unmoderated usability study
Location: California, remote
Participants: 5
Length: 15 mins
Key findings of usability study:

1. Confusing Pending Invites

Pending invited must be clear, with all elements being distinguished from each other

2. Ambiguous Time Availability

With its complexity, time availability feature must be shown in a simple and clear way

3. Inaccessible Messages

Message feature should have an easy access

Accessibility Consideration

1. Icon and text are combined to make elements more clear.
2. Colors used all pass the color contrast checker of WebAIM AccessibilityTesting.
3. Accessibility setting has been included in system setting.

High Fidelity Prototype

4. Going Forward

Takeaways

Human behaviors are diverse and complex. When designing an app, designer should consider different scenarios and try to meet distinct needs. Only by genuinely putting people at the center can designers design products that meet users’ needs.

Next Steps

1. Polish pending invite, adding a clear threshold to turn an invite from “pending” to “upcoming”.
2. Conduct research to see whether this app could cope with various scenarios.
3. Improve some minor features, like adding a draft page which saves users’ unfinished drafts.