Case Study/Schedulr
What would make negotiating meeting times less effortful?
Context
GovTech Internship
Role
Key UX Designer/Researcher
Problem
Public officers are frequently required to plan meetings for multiple people to attend. Sometimes, these meetings include people outside of their own teams (or people who aren’t public officers).
What’s so hard about planning meetings?
During the initial phase of the {build} Hackathon (where it all started), I led my team in discovering how public officers plan their meetings — hoping to uncover just where the friction was.
We spoke with public officers from varying roles:
Talent Acquisitionwhere they schedule interviews with potential intern candidates
Social Case Workerswho schedule appointments for estranged couples
Personal Assistantswho handle their boss’ busy schedules, liaising with others on their behalf
Finding #1: Scheduling meetings follows a standard flow of events:
Finding #2: Meeting organisers take on extra labour when coordinating meetings
Checking calendars isn’t accurate enough
Whenever applicable, they use Microsoft Outlook / Google Calendar to see if their invitees have available time in their schedules.
However, the schedules reflected aren’t always up to date. Sometimes the invitees don’t use these calendar tools either, so the meeting organiser has to manually contact them (via email mostly) in order to verify their availability.
Reaching out is a repetitive task
Meeting organisers have to craft the same-old messages to invite people to meetings, but the content of the message isn’t ever similar enough to simply copy and paste.
They spend mental labour and valuable time crafting an appropriate invite, and subsequently the rest of the communications, until a suitable meeting time is found.
Finding #3: Their existing toolkits still don’t take away the repetitive labour
Meeting organisers must ensure that the relevant people are able to attend the meetings they coordinate, no matter how much back and forth communication it takes. When organisers cannot depend on calendars to accurately provide information on a person’s schedule, they must reach out manually for verbal confirmation from their invitees.
The inconvenience becomes a necessary part of the meeting coordination process.
Opportunity
How do we merge technical capabilities/constraints with the broad needs of various public officers when planning meetings?
We could:
- Simplify where help would occur
- Simplify the required output of all parties
Since the main common issue across the use cases were with communication:
How might we streamline the back-and-forth communication between meeting organisers and their meeting invitees for a common meeting time?
Drawing back to the diagram in Finding #1, clearly mapping out all the minute processes helps to identify where a possible solution might fit.
The Organiser’s process:
- Gathers all the details
- Ideate possible meeting times to have the meeting
- Craft a message with all details and possible meeting times
- Reach out to multiple people
- Later on: update everyone with the confirmed time
The Invitee’s process:
- Has to check their own availability
- Respond to Organiser
The strategy:
A Call-and-Response Framework
The Organiser:
Defines meeting parameters, selects tentative slots, and sets response deadlines.
Schedulr (The System):
Handles all the heavy lifting (sending reminders, tracking responses), and enabling the organiser to confirm a meeting with a single click.
The Invitee:
Receives an interactive link, quickly inputs their availability, and opts out if needed.
Outcome
Minimising labour when defining meeting details
The proposed experience streamlines the initial phase in meeting planning. The interface is structured as a 2-stage flow: first capturing the important details of the meeting, then providing the organiser a means to map out all possible time slot options.
Key information about the meeting first:
The meeting duration, emails of desired invitees, and the deadline for invitees to respond.
Then the organiser enters their availability:
They select dates, then the time range for those days, and generate all possible time slots. They can check through the dates and times, and remove slots as they wish.
Building confidence through clarity
Organisers must be able to check through their work before it reaches others. A review section that provides a clear view over their inputs will build confidence in taking the next step: letting the system handle their work for them.
The review section allows organisers a clear overview on their input. Making edits is quick and easy: clicking “Edit” brings them straight to respective sections for them to make changes.
Since Schedulr automates notifications to invitees, the organiser can preview the emails first — giving them ease of mind before they let Schedulr take over.
Making it easy for invitees to respond
Each invitee is emailed a unique link to access their meeting invitation — a straightforward form designed to help them quickly indicate which time slots they can make it for.
By minimising the effort required from invitees, the system effectively offloads administrative labour from both parties, ensuring higher response rates and a faster path to confirmation.
Letting Organisers sit back until action is required
For the system to provide well-rounded labour support, it should handle the liaison work and inform the organiser when a meeting time is ready to be confirmed.
With the availability gathered from the invitees, a list of recommended common meeting times is generated for their review.
One more check before continuing:
From here, the meeting organiser only needs to confirm their selection and finalise the details.
Research uncovered how meeting organisers feel more confident in taking the next step when they are able to check their work.
Upon confirmation, Schedulr automatically sends out a confirmation email to all invitees, including an ICS file they can use to add the event to their own calendars.
Take a look at the live Schedulr product landing page
I handed off designs for development at the tail end of my internship (Dec 2025). Come April 2026, Schedulr went live for public officers to reap the fruit of our team’s labour >:-)
P.S. it’s also tested, researched, designed and written by me
Takeaways
UX has a part to play in MVP requirements
When discussing what to prioritise in the MVP, it’s always important to consider the “must-haves” for a good user experience. As the only UX representative on the team, I have to advocate for the user (and provide relevant evidence) so that the team can make a more informed decision together.
Nurturing a “test fast, fail fast” practice
Designing from scratch leaves a lot of room for exploration — so use it! Testing early prototypes and variations can really help give direction to design decisions made along the way. The sooner I test, the sooner I find out what works (and doesn’t) from real user feedback and insights.
Next Project
Jungle Gym