More prominent indication of preferred (ranked) slots

Derrick Reimer Amazing! Thank you. This is really great. My only request at this point is to show the full calendar immediately, instead of hiding the additional options behind the "Showing preferred time slots — click to see more" button. Based on previous experience, I continue to be concerned that a lot of people won't notice the 'click to see more' button otherwise.

Jonas Vollmer: totally! We have this behind a feature flag right now, just need to figure out what to do with the case wheee people have more than 2 layers of ranked availability 😅

Derrick Reimer Right, makes sense – perhaps it can be displayed with the first layer, and the button reveals the second layer? Dependencies, dependencies

Derrick Reimer Yes. I haven't been using the feature because people don't notice the small button at the bottom and instead email me saying there are no slots that work for them.

Derrick Reimer – I've had the same experience with optimized availability. It's great on the backend side, but schedulers just don't see the option when looking for slots. Their focus is on the time slots/calendar and since they don't know Savvycal and don't expect the "show more" option - it is just not discoverable for them. If someone sends me a link with options, why would i expect more options hidden somewhere? I like the idea to show schedulers all available options and hint them in the preferred direction with a color or something. Many people are happy to chose something that will be easier for the other side as well.

Kai Blisch Jonas Vollmer: Good to know! Tricky balance to strike, this is definitely worth improving.

Derrick Reimer You could be more open in the messaging towards the recipient, e.g. indicating that there are preferred time slots and the others. Most people would probably try to be helpful and pick one of the preferred slots.

Nico Fuchs I have in fact tried this with a text expander snippet in the past (i.e., instead of sending people the scheduling link, I've always sent them a longer explanation of how SavvyCal works). However, some of the people still were confused by how it works and said there weren't any slots that work for them. Also, explaining how a feature works is a bit unprofessional and cumbersome. Also, usually only a small number of my available slots are "preferred", so it can be the case that there are no (or only very few) preferred slots in a particular week, and it feels kind of rude to send someone a scheduling link like that. Because of these issues, I stopped using Optimized Availability, and instead am sending everyone a link that has all my slots. In the future, I might hire an executive assistant to email people to ask if they are available during more convenient times.

Another issue is that it's not possible to go back to only viewing the preferred slots instead of all available ones once you've clicked the button (apart from refreshing the page, which is not intuitive to most people). I think highlighting the preferred ones in a different color (with a little "preferred" / "recommended" indicator or similar) is the way to go. Let me know if it would be helpful for me to try and make a mock-up!

Jonas Vollmer same experience