Re-inventing the Date-picker
The issue:
For a starting matching platform that helps (planners of) schools with finding teachers in primary education I designed an online booking flow (very MVP) to shift from booking teachers per phone (which requires interaction with and manual matchmaking of a backoffice team) to booking & matching teachers online. To learn more about my design proces towards this MVP, see [link will follow].
A few months after the introduction of the booking platform, the number of phone calls had not dropped as dramatically as anticipated. In most cases, planners of schools kept booking with the help of our backoffice instead of using the booking form on the platform.
The goal:
How might we increase the use of the online booking form?
Analyzing the Data:
In order to collect a large amount of quantitative data in a short time I turned to the history of offline requested bookings. I analyzed the nature of those bookings and classified them by looking at the booking details.
Blue: Bookings with flexible start dates or bookings for multiple classes or teachers.
Purple: Bookings that could have been booked online but weren’t, due to technical shortcomings of the current date-picker.
The insights:
Of all offline requested bookings, 53% concerned bookings with flexible start dates or bookings for multiple classes or teachers. 47% concerned bookings that could have been booked online but weren’t, due to technical shortcomings of the current date-picker.
Together with the stakeholders we determined the approach; since using the date-picker is the core feature of the platform, a redesign of the current date-picker would be the obvious choice and would relatively simply solve a large portion of the problem, so we thought. The other part of offline bookings: multi-complex & flexible bookings, were deliberately left outside the scope.
Red: Number of times the booking consisted of 2 or more individual dates, with each its own time
Green: Number of times the booking consisted of an interrupted series of dates
Purple: Number of times planners of schools prefer a certain discipline over others
Blue: Number of times the booking consisted of multiple date-ranges, with each its own days and times
The concept:
The bookings details that could be attributed to technical shortcomings of the date-picker:
1. The booking consisted of 2 or more individual dates, with each its own time
2. The booking consisted of an interrupted series of dates
3. Planners of schools prefer a certain discipline over others
4. The booking consisted of multiple dateranges, with each its own days and times
It became evident that in order to increase the use of the online booking form, I had to enable users to select complex dates and date-ranges and to do this I had to revise the standard date-range-picker that was no longer sufficient. The booking details mentioned above automatically became the product requirements.
On the images below you can see how I created a complex date-picker that is technically feasible and allows users to create any combination of dates, times and ranges within one single booking.
The feedback
After running a batch of usability tests with endusers and making final adjustments, the complex date-picker went in production. The downside of my solution? It turned out no example of a date-picker this complex existed, so the development team had to build this from scratch. (They were happy to, it provided an exciting challenge). Did it solve the issue? As expected, it partially did. The usage of the online booking form increased, the workload of the backoffice team decreased, but still a remaining part of all bookings are processed manually. Take a guess yourself which part that is…
