GCal Time Poll
How might we streamline group event planning in Google Calendar?
How might we streamline group event planning in Google Calendar?
Quickly figure out when the group is available and propose best time options to send a poll
Gauge attendee preferences from poll results to make an informed time decision for your group event
Context & Problem
Imagine you’re making a group event in GCal. You don’t know everybody’s availability, so you sent out a When2Meet. However, it took ages for people to respond, and there’s hardly a time when everyone’s free...
Google Calendar is a great APP for individual time management, but using it to plan group events can still be a dilemma.
User Research Insights
First, I conducted qualitative interviews with a variety of GCal users who frequently plan group events and learned about key problems in coordinating times:
“People don’t say when they’re actually available for meetings, but only thetimes that they prefer.”
“When2Meet is good but it’s a different platform, so you have to do everything in different places — which is very inconvenient.”
“People might see the When2Meet or GCal invite and want to respond later, and then they just totally forget it.”
Brainstorming
After extensive brainstorming of 30+ possible solutions, I evaluated them with a matrix, narrowing them down to two most impactful and feasible ones:
A centralized way to display upcoming and unRSVPed event invites
Suggest multiple time options based on the group's real-time availability and collect votes to find the best time for everyone
While an event dashboard may be effective in reminding people to respond to whether they can make it to an event, the core that my people problem addresses is better time coordination, which is more effectively tackled by the time poll.
Time Polls streamline group scheduling by enabling efficient and collaborative coordination directly within Google Calendar.
By allowing planners to propose time options based on group availability while giving attendees a voice, the feature balances shared availability with individual preferences and avoids potential chaos of open-ended suggestions.
Mid-Fidelity Explorations
I explored three possible ways for event planners to make polls:
✅ Clear & prominent
❌ Extra steps required
❌ Disjointed from existing time section
✅ Easy enable/disable
❌ Double toggles create confusion
❌ Disjointed from existing time section
✅ Add option directly - saves steps
✅ Intuitively integrated into existing time section
I moved forward with Add Option to Poll, which enables the planner to add multiple time options and automatically creates a poll when more than one option is added.
Here comes the challenge: how might we effectively coordinate everyone's availability and enable event planners to figure out the best few time options to include in a poll?
Other from manually choosing times, I came up with three alternative methods:
Choose options from a list of attendee-proposed time ranges
❌ Delays in decision
❌ Organizers lose control
❌ Reflects preference rather than real availability
Choose from group calendar view with gradient showing no. of conflicts
✅ Clear visualization
✅ Reflects real availability over preference
❌ Manual time selection
Choose from a list of automatically suggested conflict-free times
✅ Automatic identification
✅ Reflects real availability over preference
❌ No visualization
I decided to keep both the group calendar view and auto-suggest.
The group calendar shows a gradient view of everyone's overlapping GCal schedules instead of relying on self-reporting to prevent missed availability, effectively addressing user insights (1) and (2).
The auto-suggest option, on the other hand, is efficient for quickly identifying gaps in everyone's schedules.
After sending a poll, there needs a way for planners to see responses and help inform a final time decision. I explored a dashboard as a centralized hub for polls.
The dashboard will include a sub-page to see polls that other planners have invited you to respond. However, ue to the project's limited scope, I decided to focus on designing the planner's end.
❌ Irrelevant to poll responses
✅ Shows response rate to inform time of deciding final event time
I also included ‘Remind’ buttons next to attendees who haven’t responded to the time poll or RSVPed to the finalized event, addressing user insight (3).
✅ Directly accessible from home page
❌ Lacks intuitiveness
❌ Disrupts exsting design & brand image
✅ Integrates seamless into existing information architecture
✅ Text label increases accessibility
❌ One more click
Iterations
After user testing with my mid-fidelity prototypes, I made the following revisions to my design:
Some users had difficulty interpreting different-colored time slots, and clicking on a slot to show the label could complicate interaction.
Users like time suggestions to be in certain ranges (e.g. only in working hours and not late at night).
High Fidelity
The time poll feature is a quick way to synchronize time and collect scheduling preferences — most user testing participants believed that this feature makes coordinating times much easier.
However, there are edge cases when the effectiveness of this feature may be limited — for instance, when all poll options received an equal amount of votes. If I had more time, I would explore these scenarios further.
*I am not affiliated in any way with Google. This case study was done for a Digital Product Design class at Cornell University.
