Request Appointments
Facebook.com / June - october 2016
During the summer of 2016, the Pages team was tasked with creating tools and features to facilitate real world outcomes on Facebook. I worked on a smaller team focused on professional services pages, or small business that had physical locations. Our team worked to develop ways that you could book appointments or services on Facebook and how it could fit into the Facebook ecosystem. The timeline for this project was 3 months from start to final implementation and I shared design responsibilities with one other designer.
Finding our Market
Because this was a new feature and something we had never done before, the professional services team went through a rigorous process of brainstorming, trying to find the simplest way for people to book services or request an appointment through a Facebook page. We started by auditing similar products such as Thumbtack, Yelp, and Google, to better understand the market. We also reached out to small business owners both on and off Facebook to better understand how they receive and schedule appointments.
We began to categorize types of small businesses into how often they received appointment requests and the cost or investment required to book. For example, a small nail salon will receive a high number of requests for low cost services and very little discussion between the needs to happen before an appointment can be booked, while a you may only need the services of a plumber occasionally, but there often is a lengthy conversation where the customer describes the problem, asks for a quote, etc before booking the service.
These discussion exposed that often the employees who schedule appointments or services aren’t always the ones who run the Facebook page. Depending on the size of the business, they used everything from email, digital calendaring or scheduling services, to phone calls and pen & paper calendars. Rather than aiming to replace all of the diverse ways people manage their business, the professional services team decided to create a new, easily manageable channel to receive these requests. We choose to focus on targeting small businesses that have either higher cost services that require longer conversations before booking, such as contractors, or businesses, like salons, where appointments are sought more frequently & require some flexibility.
Flow & Functionality
In order to make this feature easy for page admin to set up and regular people to use, we decided to leverage the messaging platform and focus on facilitating the conversation. We identified the conversational nature of both Facebook and Pages to be the strongest advantage we had over the competition. Scheduling appointments is often very time heavy for both business owners and the customer, we wanted to provide a channel to allow for the conversation around appointments to happen in an organic and lightweight manner, providing a way to converse, share photos and videos, and emerge with a set time and date for both stakeholders
Process
During this project, I explored different ways for businesses owners to start the conversation with their customers in an informed way. This included building a lightweight form builder that would allow admins to create a custom quote request form that could be added to services. These answers would be sent in the form of messages to the page and would allow admins to start the conversation with all the information they needed. In order to keep this simple, iterated on number of questions, standardization of common info they might want to collect and types of questions (multiple choice, short answer, long answer). Unfortunately, due to scope and timeline of the project, the form builder was not built, but the iterations allowed us to make improvements on the services section of pages, especially when it came to requesting appointments.
Throughout this project, we began running into issues with the services section translating across mobile and web. Every time an image was present, there were issues with the variations in sizes, so images would be cut off or resized incorrectly. To correct this, I led a quick redesign on the mobile services section to allow us to only use images with a square ratio. Because often the images uploaded by page owners were not high quality or unique, I decided to treat the image as more of a graphic element than the main source of information on the page.
Conclusion
We emerged with end to end feature that allowed for requesting an appointment or services. Myself and another designer developed designs across all platforms and for admins and consumers simultaneous, I focused primarily on the admin side of the flow, while my partner in this project focused on the consumer. We wanted to keep this flow as simple and concise as possible, letting the weight of the flow rest on parts that could be designed, the conversation. We worked with the messenger team to develop components based on their existing designs. The most challenging part of this project was making sure that there was an investment and understanding when it came to both the business owner and the person requesting that they were scheduling an actual appointment. We designed appointment booking on Facebook to fit within a small business owners already existing scheduling system, aiming on helping them get more diverse bookings, not taking the place of their calendar.
