Weave
role
Founding Product Designer
team
2 Designers, 2 Engineers, 4 Product Managers
timeline
Sep 2023 - Present
skills
Product Design, Interface Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Thematic Analysis
overview
Weave is a group scheduling platform created for students, by students — helping students find time for what's important
Back in Fall 2023, our founder Alex came to me with an idea that he'd been brewing for a few months: "What if we built a group scheduling platform for students?". The problem was simple, students like us were always struggling to find time to see our friends and family, let alone even find a time to meet with our school clubs. Intrigued by the challenge, we formed a team.
Today, after shipping our MVP back in November of 2024, Weave has over 300 active monthly users and serves as the go-to scheduling tool of five different UBC clubs. We're actively working on implementing our UI 2 (see below).
snapshot
A scheduling platformed designed to help people find time for what is important to them
problem
Due to demanding schedules, students struggle to maintain and strengthen relationship with friends and family
We know that students have fluctuating, jam-packed schedules. One day they're studying for a midterm, and the next, they're interviewing for a summer internship. But what always get pushed aside or left behind is the time to maintain relationships with family and friends. Students need a solution that give them more time to prioritize what's really important to them.
the current space
Current scheduling tools are often confusing, tedious, or costly
Existing tools in this space have failed to meet the demand of an easy to use, efficient, and cost-friendly scheduling tool.
While platforms like Outlook, Calendly, and Doodle provide polished tools, they cater towards enterprise users and hide certain features behind paywalls. With what's remaining in the space, despite their cost-effectiveness, they lack the features and overall usability to offer an effortless and enjoyable scheduling experience.
discovery
Who better to talk to than students?
We conducted user interviews with over 30 students, learning more about how they manage their time and make time for friends and family. Our qualitative insights and competitive analysis revealed two common themes circulating around the current gap in the problem space, dictating our design approach going forward.
Given their demanded schedules, students want efficient solutions for their scheduling needs. It's counterintuitive to spend time using a tool that's sole purpose is to give you more time.
If an experience promotes learnability and usability, it naturally makes it easy for the user to efficiently reach their goals. Users highly value clear and simple experiences that intuitively guide users to reaching their goals. The lack of clear signifiers and affordances increases the chances of user mistakes, user frustration, and ultimately, time delays.
ideation
What can we create?
With efficiency and clarity in mind, our team used it as our guiding north star to begin ideating.
Initially, each of us spent time using existing scheduling solutions out there, noting what works, and most importantly, what doesn't. We met on a weekly cadence, sharing our insights, bouncing ideas off each other, and hosting critiques — ultimately helping us gather our design needs, priorities, and goals.
With our priorities set straight, we began bringing our ideas to life. We hosted weekly design jams and critiques, often looping in the PMs and engineers for second opinions — helping us narrow down to our MVP.
beta
Introducing… our MVP and UI 1
After months of ideating, we brought our concept to life with our MVP.
testing
Testing, testing, testing
We were extremely proud to say we built something that we could use to schedule events, but questions started to arise. Was it working like we intended? Did our design reach our goals? How well do our designs make scheduling more efficient and clear?
To find out, we ran usability studies with five participants while running a beta program with three student clubs at UBC. Participants were asked to go through five major tasks involving Weave, answer questions relating to their usability (using UMUX scores), and questions relating to satisfaction. Additionally, we ran beta tests with three student clubs at UBC, checking in with them on a weekly cadence to gather more longitudinal feedback.
our approach
A new approach centred around three major insights
Participants shared three pivotal insights that dictated how we approach Weave's next iteration.
An abundant use of colour made it challenging to figure out what to focus on, resulting in prominent features blending right in
Action items were scattered carelessly, making it hard to follow and reducing discoverability
Users shared a strong desire for a mobile-first approach
