Flexible meetings with real time availability
Katch
01 / 05 | Introduction
Project Overview
Disclaimer
Please note that the design deliverables included in this case study are for reference only and may not match the final designs used by Katch.
Katch is a US-based early-stage startup with less than 20 employees. At the time I joined the company as the sole designer on the team, the product was in the private beta stage.
Outcomes
Designed a Slack prototype as at the time we deemed it to be the ideal medium to conduct user research and observe user behaviors.
Re-designed several primary features for the Katch iOS app and conducted discussion sessions with the Head of Product and the dev team.
02 / 05 | TESTIMONIAL
What they say about my work
Testimonial
Goksu demonstrated strong analytical skills and could easily grasp the whole user journey from the first day of his work, which really impressed me. Thanks to his user empathy skills he helped us redesign the navigation of the app and worked on a slack app which is still to be implemented. Goksu can challenge ideas that make him a great team member and I can envision he is going to have a great career in user experience design.
— Anna Blasiak, Head of Product at Katch
03 / 05 | SLACK APP
Experimenting with a Slack app
Introduction
After a quick onboarding that brought me up to speed, getting me to know about the issues that the product was facing at the time, the Head of Product and I conducted several brainstorming sessions to decide on the best medium to test the product-market fit and primary/secondary features.
We concluded that a Slack app would be the ideal medium as it is easy to prototype, it is relatively quick to develop, and, most importantly, most of our target audience would use Slack as part of their professional life regularly.
Two Forms of Availability
Two forms of availability
Around the time we had just started working on this Slack app, we considered two different forms of availability that I called local availability and global availability.
Local availability: A person would be locally available when they signal that they are available to the people who sent meeting requests at a prior date or to a pre-selected group of people.
Global availability: A person would be globally available when they signal that they are available to everyone. This could be called "unselective availability" as well.
The reason why we considered this concept of local availability was that in some very large companies, signaling that you are (globally) available to everyone on your Slack channel means that hundreds of people would be able to request meetings, making it extremely hard for the user to maintain.
For reasons that I was not informed of at the time, we were asked to quit working on the Slack app and move to work on the iOS app that the company was already developing at the time I joined.
04 / 05 | IOS APP
The next frontier: iOS
Shortly after, the executive team set a date for a Product Hunt launch, per some changes in the company's short-term plan, and to make sure that we do not miss the deadline, we had to work in a very agile manner, redesigning primary features and preparing/explaining handoffs to engineers in an almost bi-daily manner to complete the Katch iOS app.
As my seniors were worried that the product was bloated with many features, the Head of Product and I were asked to work on and re-design some hand-picked features that were considered necessary for the optimal user experience. Those three key features were Availability Hours, Marking as Done, and Sending Meeting Requests.
Availability Hours
Availability Hours helps the user to get more timely reminder notifications from the Katch iOS app.
Thanks to a new user flow we came up with, our users no longer need to turn on/off this feature, enhancing the user experience immensely.
Marking as Done
To make sure that the user interface is not bloated with inactive meeting request cards, we enabled our users to mark them as done and remove them from their interfaces.
