Doodle Blog

We are asked about the technology landscape at Doodle from time to time. And usually we blog about it every now and then.

This time we choose a different approach and decided to give a talk about our latest integration project: MongoDB. To warm up, Malte Schiebelmann gave a short talk at Webtuesday, Zurich this week. On thursday David Gubler and he also held a full day workshop at the ch/open workshop days.

To share our insights, you can check out the presentation, Malte gave at Webtuesday below.

MongoDB Intro

Here comes the quote of the month:

What a great tool this Doodle is! One of my students suggested it to me as a way to schedule a meeting (20 people), and it works wonderfully. Even the participants who aren’t very technologically savvy commented on how easy it is to use.

Many thanks for sharing this with all of us!

Susan P.

And some particularly nice tweets:

@misener Oh @doodletweet, you make calendaring such a civilized affair.

@alandanimal Is @doodletweet not the most useful web tool ever?

@dannysullivan if you ever have to schedule a group meeting, @doodletweet is awesome http://bit.ly/kqaOU0

@askmanny Few… VERY few web products I feel as strongly about as I feel about Doodle! Thanks @DoodleTweet for bringing sanity to meeting planning!

@alukeonlife By far, the tool that saves me the most time: http://doodle.com/ arrange meetings for multiple people easily.

Today is the day when we proudly release our new mobile version, which includes an updated mobile Web interface that is optimized for modern smartphones, as well as some other mobile-specific features.

The new Mobile Doodle ensures smooth handling on the touch screen, show all relevant information concisely and features almost all of Doodle’s functionality, including:

• Create polls
• Send invitations via the mobile email client, Twitter, or Facebook
• Comment on polls
• Edit your own participation
• Close poll and pick final time
• MyDoodle dashboard
• Premium Doodle (no ads)
• Calendar connect (view your calendar data during poll creation and participation)

If you haven’t connected your calendar with Doodle yet, then the new mobile version is definitely a reason to do so because having a connected calendar simplifies both creating and answering meeting invitations due to the fact that you’ll always see when your schedule has open time slots.

The ability to select your current location as the meeting place is one of the mobile-specific features that isn’t included in the standard Web version. As an added bonus, you can also directly contact participants via telephone or email by just clicking on their names when the information was collected during the poll participation (requires Premium Doodle). This is useful when people don’t show up for a meeting or you need to change the meeting location at the last minute.

The complete mobile redesign is a natural next step because of the redesign of our standard Web version and skyrocketing mobile usage. It’s easy to see that smartphones are being widely distributed at a very high level*. We also see this in the usage of Doodle, which has had a threefold increase per year in the last two years. Not only does this change people’s communication habits, but it also shows website providers that users have clear mobile expectations. For example, our own research shows that the main usability demand of mobile users is that websites be optimized for their smartphones.

We actively support and have tested the mobile version on IE9, WebKit (iPhone, Safari, BlackBerry 6 and later, Nokia S60 and later), Opera 6 and later, and Firefox 4. We also provide native apps for the iPhone and Android.

The new design was done by virtuallyhandmade, and they’re the same company that redesigned Doodle’s standard Web version.

m.doodle.com

Poll initiate w/ optional geolocation

Date select: small bars indicate availability

Poll participation w/ calendar context

*Latest figures: Smartphone sales up 74% in Q2 2011 vs. Q2 2010 (Gartner, Inc. – August 2011)

We released the new beta version of the mobile participation page last month, and yesterday we added the poll creation wizard, too. On any modern* mobile device, you can now go through the whole process of creating a poll, inviting participants, participating, and closing a poll. Visit m.doodle.com or go to Doodle.com on your mobile phone and select “Switch to new Mobile Doodle BETA”. We’re looking forward to getting your feedback!

We also launched a super basic desktop version of Doodle’s participation page that can be helpful if you use an older browser that doesn’t support the regular Doodle user interface. With this version, you can always be 100% sure that everyone will be able to answer a Doodle invitation no matter what software they use.

Users in Switzerland might also see a new form of advertising because we’re now experimenting with calendar ads. These ads will give advertisers the ability to promote events directly in Doodle polls in a chronological way.

Watch also the new intro film that was created during our video contest!

*We support IE9, WebKit (iPhone, Safari, BlackBerry 6 and later, Nokia S60 and later), Opera 6 and later, and Firefox 4 and later. We can’t guarantee perfect operation on all other / older software.

We were not surprised by the fact that we actually passed the usability stress test, but we were surprised by the fantastic rankings that you gave us for the most important usability criteria (see chart). This month, more than 1,000 Doodle users provided feedback about Doodle’s usability.

We asked the same question in January in order to find out whether the complete redesign would impact usability in a positive way. This time, ratings improved all-around. The decreasing number of support requests shows that many of the UX issues have been resolved and Doodle has become more intuitive to use.

We will continue to work on making Doodle as user-friendly as possible!

Twitter is a popular way to send out Doodle polls to participants, and it’s also a great way for users to express their opinions about Doodle. Here are some recent quotes from Twitter users. Thanks for your comments!

@buckwoody Ever have those “no, Friday is not good for me, how about Thursday? No? How about Tuesday?” I use this: Doodle calendar connect

@effingcool Doodle is the the most useful thing (and most #effingcool thing) i’ve found in a long time

@kabissa Yes, I am back to Doodle!

@MissAnnieShek How do you organize large meetings without hassle? Check out @doodletweet! I <3 being #efficient

@tmetten Thank you @doodletweet for such a wonderful service you provide us with. I especially love the #ics integration! #doodleisawesome

@akaalichen My recommendation of the day: @doodletweet for scheduling. It’s free and an easy way to visualize everyone’s availability. Easy Peasy!

@8bbAdvocate Falling in love with Doodle, especially now that I see it integrates with g-cal. Veddy sexy.

@PaperOnline Paper calendars still dominant in the world of appointments http://bit.ly/nsc7TJ

We’re very happy to announce the winners of our video contest today. The “Bachelor Party” by Beckdesign clearly qualified for the first prize as the most professional entry with its humorous approach. It will be featured as the introductory video on Doodle.com, and an English and French version will also be developed.

(English version coming soon)

We congratulate the team on their great work and hope they enjoy safe flights around the world with their prize! Beckdesign’s director Guido Beck told us, “Within a short time, we produced this stop-motion film as a contest entry from the original text to the final cut. Since we use Doodle ourselves, we had a lot of fun with this video project.”

The second prize goes to the collection of fruit in “Let’s get together” by Magdalena Kauz. Magdalena described her work like this, “It was a lot of fun to view something that you do every day with completely different eyes by taking uninspiring organizational work and transforming it ‘fruitfully’. A special thanks goes to Cherry, Apple, Pear, and Peach.”

We’d like to say a big thank you to all of the filmmakers for their engagement, their great ideas, and the good time we had watching the entries! Enjoy the videos below!

We may think we live in a digital society, but the 87% of Internet users who use a calendar don’t always do so in a digital way. In fact, the world is still dominated by paper calendars.

How do people handle their appointments and how do they live with their calendars? These questions grabbed our interest and we wanted to get some answers. To do that, we asked about 530 Doodle users to answer an extensive list of questions (on-site sample), and last week, around 2,000 regular Internet users* completed a set of questions (online sample). Here are the main findings from our first analysis that we wanted to share with you.

5.7 appointments in an average week
An average Internet user has 5.7 appointments in an average week. 50% have 1-4 appointments, 9% have no appointments at all, and 41% have five or more appointments in an average week. Respondents also indicated that they have an average of more than 10 appointments in a particularly busy week.

People who either mainly have business appointments or have the same amount of personal and business appointments tend to have more appointments in an average week, namely 10.5 and 7.6 respectively compared to 3.3 for people who mainly have personal appointments in an average week (see chart 1). Doodle users reported an average of 13 appointments per week in the on-site survey.

Chart 1: Number of appointments in an average and in a particularly busy week by people who mainly have personal or mainly business appointments, or an equal split between the two (N=2021)

49% still use a paper calendar – women and Germans at the top of the list

A surprisingly high segment of 49% of Internet users said they used a paper calendar as their main calendar (see chart 2) while only 21% of the Doodle users from the on-site sample said that this was the case with them. Other main systems are electronic desktop calendars (Outlook, iCal, Lotus Notes, etc.), calendars on mobile devices, and Web-based calendars (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). 12.9% don’t use a calendar at all while 15.2% use two or more calendars at the same time. In France, 23% of Internet users don’t have a calendar.

Chart 2: Calendar systems in use (N=2011)

The Germans (60%) and women in general (62%) are more likely to use a paper calendar as their main calendar. People with business meetings are more likely to have a main electronic calendar that is synchronized with a server. Americans (7% compared to 2.6% of the Germans) and younger people (6.6%) are more likely to choose a Web-based calendar and younger people lead the way in having their main calendar on a mobile device (27%).

Additionally, only 30% of people who use electronic, Web-based, or mobile calendars are happy with them and don’t think that they need additional features. The rest would like to see additional features that are mostly covered by an online scheduling tool like Doodle, such as the possibility to propose multiple options when scheduling an appointment and the capability to invite people who are using other calendar systems (see chart 3).

Chart 3: Features that electronic or Web-based calendars should offer in addition to what they do today (N=1249)

Online scheduling is used by 67% of the Swiss and 21% of the rest of the world

Update: People on average spend 17 minutes per day on coordinating meetings with others. The amount of time spent on doing so grows with the amount of appointments that people have, however, the time needed for scheduling per meeting decreases (see chart 4). What we see here, are meeting experts who use suitable tools to get the scheudling job done quickly, despite the lack of available time slots in their calendars.

Chart 4: The time needed to coordinate one appointment decreases with the number of appointment one has (N= 2021)

Personal / phone conversations and email are absolutely dominating the way meetings are coordinated (see chart 5). These methods are followed by meeting requests, online scheduling tools like Doodle, and Facebook. The Swiss Internet users have adopted online scheduling to the largest extent (67% compared to 21% of the rest of the world who use it sometimes or frequently). Per appointment, the Swiss need about half the time for the coordination as the rest of the world. In terms of online scheduling adoption, Switzerland is followed by France, Germany, and the United States. The numbers also show that online scheduling is more popular among people who mainly have business appointments and people who regularly schedule appointments with more than two individuals.

Chart 5: Methods of communication used for the coordination of appointments (N=2021)

Doodle connects all calendars

These first results are a strong confirmation for the relevance of Doodle – which is the platform that covers missing features that calendars don’t or can’t provide and that connects users of all different types of calendars, including those who use a paper agenda or no calendar at all. However, we didn’t find a way yet to technically integrate your paper agenda with Doodle but all electronic calendars can be connected making the coordination of appoinments even more efficient and fun.

*2,021 Internet users normalized by age and gender from Switzerland, USA, France, and Germany (N=500 respondents each) were surveyed online by respondi AG between July 4-8, 2011. By default, results from the Internet user survey (online sample) are discussed. Results from the Doodle user survey (on-site sample) are highlighted separately.

Doodle’s mobile versions are very popular and the number of people who are using the mobile Web version (Mobile Doodle) and the iPhone and Android apps is growing faster than the number of people who are using the classic Web version.

We’re currently working on a complete redesign of Mobile Doodle that is similar to the recent Doodle redesign, and you can now check out some of the changes by selecting “Try our new design (BETA)” on our mobile website.

These are some of the more important new features:

• New user interface for the home page, participation page, and the MyDoodle dashboard
• Calendar Connect gives you access to your calendar information available when using Mobile Doodle
• Consolidated view of the poll participation page that shows all other participants and your personal calendar information
• State-of-the-art technology like HTML5 and CSS3 as well as our own small JavaScript framework

Give it a try and let us know what you think — thanks!

A special thanks goes to Research In Motion (BlackBerry) and Nokia for providing our test devices.

Last weeks we asked you to tell us how you manage your calendar and appointments. This was a quite extensive questionnaire and we want to thank all of you who took their time to complete it! Right now we we are still analysing data and can tell so much: that’s really interesting stuff and you will definitely hear back from us with the results.

Thank you very much for the great comments, too! Here’re just some of them:

Interesting questions! I’ve learnt a bit about myself.

The questionnaire was very precise. Thanks. Not a single redundant question.

Some of your questions embarrassed me because your questionnaire hasn’t been conceived for a pensioner … Besides that, CHEER with Doodle. What a splendid tool! Thank you.

The big problem is to merge the company agenda with the private that is on another PC.

Doodle has been a great tool even for friends and colleagues who are uncomfortable with technology – I love it!!

Merci Doodle!

I LOVE DOODLE