What is Calendly?
Calendly is a popular online scheduling tool. Meeting hosts provide their availability to Calendly, and Calendly creates a scheduling page that hosts can share to people they want to meet with. The scheduling page only provides times that work for the host, so once the invitee selects a time, the meeting is booked with no need to go back and forth.
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An overlooked element of Calendly’s mobile experience
The bulk of my time at Calendly has been spent improving our native mobile app experiences. When I started at Calendly, the product largely followed the web experience in terms of target users and focus. There had been minimal exploration into how the experience should differentiate itself from web, or how our users might have different needs or expectations on mobile.
One early sign of a diverging use case was that our users spent a surprising amount of time in the scheduled events section, which provided a list of all their past and upcoming meetings scheduled through Calendly. This caught us by surprise, as most mobile phones already have a built in calendar with rich feature sets. Through user interviews, I learned that our customers chose to use our scheduled events section over other calendar apps because its presentation was easier to interpret and we were showing the slice of meetings that users felt were the most important to them. Other calendar apps often included events such as standups, birthdays, and other coworkers’ time off which were deemed less important and created visual clutter.
Calendly vs. Apple Calendar - Many users were using the Calendly scheduled events section instead of their built-in calendars because it was visually easier to parse and it only showed their most important meetings.
Discovering new uses
As we investigated how mobile users were engaging with the scheduled events screen with greater intensity, we came across another finding: there was a fair number of hosts who were booking meetings through their own Calendly booking pages. This was surprising to us because Calendly’s model was based upon a host creating a page with their own availability rules and sharing a link to invitees.
So why were hosts booking through an experience designed for invitees?
Hosts that worked in sales often wanted to book with the lead while on the call—leaving it up to the lead to schedule the meeting after the call was risky.
Booking through Calendly allowed them to take advantage of our robust integrations and workflows.
They didn’t have to worry about interpreting their own calendar—Calendly already knew when they were free so they could make decisions faster.
As my team dug into this problem further, we learned that at a minimum, 1 in 5 meetings were being booked on the booking page by the host. This was significant since this method of scheduling was more of a hack than a feature, and it added evidence that users really needed a product that did more for scheduling.
Identifying gaps and needs
After having been surprised by the feature usage on mobile, we took a step back and surveyed our mobile users to get a sense of the areas where users were dissatisfied but also what they thought was going well.
Areas of dissatisfaction
Users cited difficulties navigating the app and locating certain features (esp. availability). Some users found the process of updating global availability in the app cumbersome. They expressed frustrations around getting redirected to mobile web to complete certain tasks (some users found mobile web sluggish and outdated).
Strengths of real-time meeting management in mobile
58% of users agreed that the mobile app helps them to manage meetings in real-time. Users mentioned two different use cases:
Users said booking a follow up meeting while in the meeting makes a good impression on invitees and keeps them from forgetting to share/book afterwards. Users who shared links in the meeting spoke of similar benefits.
Users also mentioned using the app to check and manage their schedules. Users wanted to know what was coming next and to be able to quickly modify their schedules if a meeting was running over.
While there were no mentions of screen sharing specifically (ie. screen sharing a host’s availability to an invitee), there was a sense that it was quicker and less disruptive to use the app while in a meeting.
New App Experiences
As a result of our research and findings, we learned that the app required a significant amount of work to both simplify the navigation and also build towards an experience where scheduled events would play a central role. By the end of the project, nearly every screen in the app would be redone. For my portfolio, I’m going to describe the improvements we made to the event type screen as well as a range of improvements to the scheduling events section.
The event types screen as
it was when I joined Calendly
Event types
So far I have written a lot about mobile’s unique needs as far as scheduling goes. However, the core Calendly experience is anchored in meeting types (previously called event types). Meeting types are the first thing the user sees upon signing into Calendly on web. We wanted to maintain that paradigm, but felt we should streamline the landing screen so it was easier to parse.
We identified several issues that we sought to refine and improve upon in the new experience, including:
Brand and styling alignments to bring us in line with the overall Calendly brand.
Removal of independent CTAs on the face of the ET cards in favor of an action sheet model in order to simplify visual complexity and reduce the instances of tapping the wrong command.
Aligning to a bottom navigation paradigm across the board and dropping the hamburger menu to help simplify the user’s mental model.
In this video, you can see the updates to the event type screen. One of the more debated issues among staff with the new design was a concern that placing commonly used actions such as copy link and book meeting into an action sheet would require additional taps. However, we were fairly confident in our approach since during usability testing several users remarked that the experience ‘felt slick’ and ‘faster’ than previously. As a result, we proceeded to implement the design of the action sheet, since we believed that simplifying the visuals on the screen would make it easier to interpret and use.
This decision was validated upon release as sharing rates were not negatively impacted with the implementation of the action sheet, but many users were excited by the new approach.
The old designs for the scheduled events section
Scheduled events
Up until this point, the mobile app’s scheduled events section had consisted of largely rudimentary and utilitarian designs. This was at odds with the findings that we were getting from our user research—it had become clear that scheduled events was arguably the most important section of the app—even more important than sharing out links. Considering this and that we knew we would only continue to invest in functionality for hosts to better manage their schedules, we felt it was important to give this section an interaction and visual overhaul.
Additionally, we had long heard requests from users for a contacts section. At this stage, a contact’s information was tied to an event, so if you wanted to look up a previous invitee’s information, you had to go through the arduous task of digging through your previous events to find the relevant one.
In this video, you can see some of the many changes we implemented to scheduled events aimed at addressing our user needs and feedback.
A day by day view in addition to our agenda view to give users more options in how they can view their upcoming events.
Updated visual styling for both our scheduled events and event detail screens to make the experience feel more premium and align better to the Calendly brand.
The addition of an action sheet on the event details screen to support an ever expanding array of scheduling options.
The ability to book a follow-up meeting from an ongoing or past meeting (not shown in this video).
Deep linking from events into contacts and vice versa so that popular actions such as booking follow-up meetings were easy to do without having to navigate to other sections of the app.
Project Results
Most of the features I’ve showcased here shipped late summer of 2024. The initial results have been strong. The summer bundle which included updates for contacts, scheduled events, and scheduling in real time features led to a large increase of traffic to the scheduled events tab. We had meaningful increases in daily active usage, app sessions and app adoptions. Additionally, we shipped In-App Purchases for the first time, and have seen a higher than expected revenue stream develop from the mobile app.
As always, there is room for growth. We now know that roughly half of our users on mobile exclusively use the mobile app to engage with Calendly. We also know that the majority of paying mobile users are solopreneurs. This gives us a good foundation to enter 2025 and continue to develop the product.