Availability Links
CommandDot
Founder
A booking link experience that better serves the recipient's needs
I designed a booking link that primarily focuses on the recipient's booking experience. Availability Links were the first booking links that look and feel like a real calendar + added the sender's availability alongside the recipient's schedule.
this week (all PST):
- Mon (Nov 21): 9 AM, 11 AM
- Tue (Nov 22): 10 AM, 11 AM, 1 PM
- Wed (Nov 23): 9 AM, 10 AM, 11 AM
Challenge
How might we create a booking link that improves the recipient's booking experience?
Constraints
Working as the only designer at an early-stage startup while moving to a new city during the middle of a pandemic brought its own set of personal and professional challenges. I’d be remiss to not mention that here first and foremost.
During my 2.5 years at CommandDot, I was all things design. This included design across the entire product, research, ui/ux, branding, marketing, website design & development (thanks Webflow), onboarding, dashboards, emails + an overwhelming amount of other shelved ideas that still live scattered throughout my Figma files today.
Soon after I joined the team, COVID quickly changed the way people booked and held meetings. Everything was now a Zoom call. People were no longer meeting in person, and it was becoming obvious that this would be the case for the foreseeable future.
This caused us to evolve the product to also support personalized booking links with Zoom support after initially focusing exclusively on plain-text availability that encouraged in-person meetings to foster relationships. For me, this meant focusing design across two separate products simultaneously throughout my time at the company.
Research
Interviews
After our team conducted a series of interviews, we were able to understand scheduler’s motivations as well as blockers for booking someone and the pain points involved with both.
Key user stories
As a scheduler, I want to be able to share my booking link without inconveniencing the other person.
As a scheduler, I have trouble landing meetings when sending out a booking link.
As a scheduler, I want a booking link that helps develop a relationship before the meeting.
Key Features
Turning the booking page into a calendar.
The first step towards redesigning booking links from the ground up was creating an experience that the recipient is familiar—their calendar. Turning what is normally a long list of time slots provided without context into a scrollable calendar-like experience provided instant comfortability to the recipients of Availability Links.
Limiting the dates and times shown and shared
The Date Bar only shows the span of dates that have slots that are available to book. That meant no more click-hunting between months of calendars to find availability as the recipient. Availability Links were also designed to be limited to 2-weeks of availability to help eliminate the paradox of choice for the recipient, while creating some natural scarcity to encourage recipients to not hold off or forget to book.
Recipient calendar events + the sender's availability.
Recipient calendar events are shown right alongside the availability of the person they want to meet with. As the recipient, they no longer had to tab or swipe over to their calendar to double and triple check their schedule to find open time-slots. With the sender's availability now shown in the flow of their familiar schedule, recipients can clearly see the overlapping availability they have with the sender, or decide without checking their calendar if an event is worth booking over.
Final Deliverable
With a new approach to the booking experience, users were able to share their Availability Links with more confidence and certainty that their recipients would have a better booking experience.
And, Availability Links also paired with CommandDot's Availability product to unlock the choice and benefits of booking links and/or plain-text availability to complete the scheduling suite of products.
Takeaway & Reflection
While working on designing a CLI for sharing plain-text availability, I was also asked to design a new booking link experience to pair with it. Due to being the sole designer on the team, it was extremely challenging to handle design on both projects simultaneously, but taught me how to prioritize features based on continuous feedback from users.
I also discovered that the personas of each product were very different based on how each scheduled which gave me deeper insights that improved the design of both products. I'm excited to see where booking page design heads in the future and what else can be improved.