Google Calendar Case Study

JANUARY 2024 – MAY 2024

Project Scope: Part of UCLA DevX User Experience Research Internship, a cohort of 7. This project is not affiliated with Google or Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling tool developed by Google. It is designed to help users organize their schedules, events, and appointments in a digital format.

My capstone project in this program was to conduct a UX case study on a product of our choice. I completed this project under the guidance of the program lead, Brandon Day.

User Research

I selected Google Calendar since I was very familiar with it and had been using the most at the time. Before I began my research, I outlined five questions:

Process: Competitive Analysis

I started with market research to learn more context for Google Calendar before I wrote questions for user surveys or planned usability tests. I researched competitors Apple Calendar and Notion Calendar.

Process: User Survey

I gathered insights and background about users and their pain points through a user survey, and simultaneously recruited participants for usability testing. Through their individualized responses, I could tailor usability tests to focus on personalized problems.

I shared this survey on Instagram for a period of 24 hours and collected 22 responses in this time to the following questions:

I originally intended to share the form in subreddits dedicated to surveys and polling for a wider demographic of participants, but final exams sidetracked my case study. Fortunately, I was still able to get a good range of responses, from high school students to college students to multiple post-graduate workers.

I synthesized the results from the survey into two user personas: the needs of a student versus the needs of a working professional.

Process: Usability Testing

I devised a couple of scenarios and wrote the script for usability tests based on the responses I received, with my personas as a guide.

I conducted 6 usability tests over a week via Zoom and in person. I noted where users felt confused or stuck when completing a task. Participants were assigned scenarios they were least familiar with based on their survey responses, so I could observe how intuitively they could complete foreign tasks.

Results

Full case study

View my research pitch deck for the UCLA DevX Internship Demo Day below:

CONCLUSION

FUTURE STEPS

More Usability Testing & Survey Outreach 📖
Given more time, I want to conduct more usability tests and scope more areas which may cause users confusion while navigating the app. I would also send the user survey in the subreddits to hear from a population outside of my Instagram followers.
Modify User Survey Questions 📊
I would ask for more demographic information such as age, occupation, etc. to analyze any trends with the data. Upon reflection, I found that my case study could be considerably improved considering other external factors.
A/B Testing 🤔
I want to make more UI mockups of Google Calendar and conduct A/B testing to observe how different prototypes perform against each other. To keep iterating and improving is the goal!