Smart Calendar
enterprise UX design
OVERVIEW
I'm the lead designer for a financial services client's Salesforce-based iOS app that's used by external wholesalers to sell funds to financial advisors. I've included some of the work I'm doing for Smart Calendar, a new feature to help the wholesalers quickly see their availability and schedule meetings with nearby advisors.
This is a proprietary app, so I cannot disclose the client or other features that I'm working on.
Tools: Sketch
Skills: enterprise UX design, design systems, adaptive design
Role: designer
Time: winter 2023
BACKGROUND
PRIMARY USERS + NEED
This app is used by wholesalers who are selling mutual funds to financial advisors. They are always on the go, and their success heavily relies on meeting with as many advisors as possible. However, they often only have a few minutes in between meetings to review their schedule and book new visits.
The current experience makes it difficult to view their open availability and to see their zone schedule.
PROCESS
I took the existing design system for the app and updated it to meet the new business and technical requirements from the product managers. This included integrating more iOS UI to create a familiar and consistent experience across this app and other native iOS apps.
I collaborated with the users, product managers, and engineers to ensure this design met the requirements and would be feasible to implement.
SMART CALENDAR
DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
Smart Calendar is a new calendar approach that allows users to find open times to schedule meetings with advisors that are in the same geographic area as other scheduled meetings. The major new requirements are:
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Create a contextual view (aka "Smart Calendar") so that users can see open times in their calendars
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Indicate daily zones
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Enable users to easily compare their calendar with another wholesaler's calendar
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Display important meeting details, like advisor priority level and type of meeting
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Allow users to quickly find other advisors in the same area of a given meeting
BEFORE
AFTER
Cleaner stacked view with essential meeting details and daily zones
BEFORE
AFTER
More intuitive view to compare schedule with other users
BEFORE
AFTER
Schedule a meeting on one page with less taps and clearer field grouping
MY CHANGES
Some of my changes include:
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Various calendar views - toggle between Smart Calendar (contextual) and stacked view
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Choose between day, work week, full week, and month views
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Simplified way to compare calendars - remove unnecessary meeting information and compare in all calendar views
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Meeting summary popup - quickly review key details and actions without navigating to the meeting details page
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Zone schedule - view schedule by month to plan zone visits in advance
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Pill design - communicate important meeting features in a consistent way
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Current time indicator - show where the user is in their day
Smart Calendar View
Meeting Summary Popover
Zone Schedule
Updated Design System (sample)
REFLECTION
This is the most hands-on experience I've had with enterprise UX. I had to shift my mindset from consumer design to focus more on business needs and efficiency. I leveraged my creative problem solving to rethink how a basic calendar can be customized to meet the specific needs of my users.
Being the only designer on this project really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I had to organize a messy design system and Zeplin files, redesign full pages and experiences, collaborate with salespeople who have dozens of years more experience than me, and sometimes make executive design decisions that I was unsure about. I took on responsibilities of a much more senior designer, and I gained confidence in my abilities to lead a design project.
