Sign-Ups streamline scheduling by enabling athletes and staff to book their own appointments within set availability. It supports scheduling for sports medicine, community service, facility use, coach-athlete meetings, and more.
My role
Lead Product Designer
The team
1 Product Manager
1 Engineering Manager
1 Back End Engineer
3 Front End Engineers
Timeline
Q1 & Q2 of 2022 for design
Q2 - Q4 of 2022 for build
Problem
Teamworks customers rely on expensive third-party scheduling apps to set up bookable appointments because Teamworks only had a basic calendar feature. These apps did not sync with the Teamworks calendar or user directory, leading to growing dissatisfaction with customers who could not justify paying for multiple apps.
Solution
Build a new feature that allows users to set up appointment slots within the Teamworks app and leverage the user directory to make the booking flow seamless.
Let’s start with the good stuff, what did we accomplish after we built this feature?
We invited 216 organizations to beta test Sign-Ups, aiming for 30 to adopt the feature. Surpassing expectations, 150 organizations actively used Sign-Ups for their specific needs and provided feedback!
The lack of Sign-Ups initially deterred customers from joining Teamworks. With this feature's release, we successfully secured contracts from both previously interested and prospective customers in negotiations.
By mid-2023 (six months after general release) we hit a 96% gross retention rate, with the new Sign-Ups feature being recognized as a critical factor to retention.
Below you’ll find just a few snippets of positive feedback shared by our CS and Sales reps:
I worked with the Product Manager (PM) to research existing feedback, talk to Customer Success reps (CS) and the engineering team to see if this idea had legs.
According to User Voice, a tool that CS uses to log customer feedback, the ability to create bookable appointments or sign-ups was high in demand with customers across all markets.
Specific examples of some of these customer requests:
Working closely with the PM, we determined the need for two flows. We needed an Admin Flow where a user creates a set of Sign-Up slots for other Teamworks users to book. We also needed a Booking Flow (also known as the Athlete Flow) where users can see Sign-Ups that they are eligible for, view the availability within each Sign-Up and book a slot that works for them. The booked slot would then convert to an event on their Teamworks calendar.
I went through my usual process of ideation with sketches and wireframes. Here are two ideas for the Admin Flow that myself, the PM and the engineering manager (EM) narrowed down within my explorations:
Idea 1: Users set up sign up events directly on the existing calendar
Pro: Leverage existing calendar to easily add sign up events.
Con: Staff and facility calendars can be extremely busy and sign up events can span months in some cases. A separate view might not be totally avoided.
Idea 2: We have a dedicated space where users can create sign up events
Pro: We don’t have to fit things in a small space and rework existing components painfully to make this new feature work.
Con: It would take more time to build than just piggybacking off of the existing calendar.
Idea #2 was the resounding winner after we walked CS through both versions and talked through all the technical feasibility with the engineering team. The calendar was too cluttered and this feature really needed dedicated space to be managed. The build complexity existed no matter what and we needed to do this right!
Below you can find a few key screenshots from the Admin flow on desktop and Booking flow on mobile (Scroll horizontally to view all screens).
Admin flow
Booking flow
We encountered quite a few challenges, as to be expected with a complex feature such as Sign-Ups! For the sake of time I’ll highlight the ones I felt were pretty huge:
The goalpost moved due to unforeseen technical issues.
Our goal was to have Sign-Ups ready for beta by August (mid Q3), but we faced delays due to loading issues, slot limits, and extended development time.
Solution: Trimmed scope to launch sooner - Admin Flow on web, Athlete Flow on mobile only. Despite missing the August 2022 target, this adjustment allowed us to release a functional feature by end of Q4.
Infinity slots = huge problem!
Initially we didn’t place a limit on the number of slots in a sign-up in the design to make it flexible. But it created SERIOUS performance issues having to load unlimited slots.
Solution: We set a reasonable limit based on our beta user query. 700 slots covered over 95% of cases. If users exceed this, we notify them to create an extra sign-up for the remaining dates/times. While not ideal, it allowed us to get out the door making most of our users happy.
You may not get all the slots you think you want.
Imagine I wanted 6 slots that were 5 minutes long with a 5 minute break in between, all in 30 minutes. Any slots outside of the 30 minutes would not be created. There was no way for a user to know this until they saved a sign-up.
Solution: Show a preview of a day with the criteria they’ve entered so they can decide if/how they want to set the time constraints.
We still have a lot of feedback to work through to improve Sign-Ups. We also introduced a new design system early last year, so we need to revisit the look and feel to align Sign-Ups with other parts of the product. But considering the success metrics so far, we are all extremely proud to have provided this feature to our customers!