Organizing fitness classes combining round robin and seats.
Opened this issue · 3 comments
I wanted to share my experience with cal.com and some issues I have met with the solution and support.
Here is the use case.
Two (and later more) physiotherapists work in the same building. Each of them is free to manage its own availability. One of their activities is to organize EMS (electrostimulation while you do fitness) sessions for groups of 3. They can organize scheduled classes but also enable people to book collective sessions. The classes would be open when they are free between 6 and 9 pm during work weeks and on a different schedule on weekends.
I have tried several configurations and didn't manage to make it work as it would be expected.
I'll recap below all the issues I faced and how the product can be improved. I want to state that I have asked for a refund and it was processed without any pushback within 3 hours. I am not upset but I really believe in this product and the team, so here is some feedback.
Before going into the specific of the configuration issue. I want to say that having team access gated is really an issue. While I know that trial accesses are not so popular anymore, cal.com value to a user is in the details of what you can and cannot do with its most advanced booking features. It's annoying not being able to try it out. I think that being directed towards a very high level marketing pitch video can be a bit infuriating. I expect it to point to documentation but I have found the docs to be very incomplete and not very useful. There are several times when configuring the solution where the behavior of a feature would not be obvious to me and I couldn't find any information.
On these points my reco would be:
- Allow trial, with required credit card if needed
- More complete documentation
- More text and tooltip to describe the features in the configuration screens
Now some of the issues I faced for the use case.
- Viewing availabilities (minor issue)
This view of availability is hard to understand.
The issue might originate from the fact that my computer is in gmt -4 and I am looking at gmt+2 schedule. This is probably a quick fix
- As an individual I am able to set which availability schedule applies to an event type. This is not possible in a round robin event.
This below is for individuals
below is for teams
I believe it should be possible to select which availability schedule of each team member should apply. Using a common schedule will make the round robin fail since it might propose a time outside of the expected working hours of one of the staff members.
- The round robin invites are confusing... or maybe don't work
It seems that the Admin of the team is always the Organizer and thereby included in the meeting invitation. I am not entirely sure if it is a bug or an expected behavior. In practice it means that the organizer will be made unavailable at that time, at the same time of the team member assigned. In practice, this completely defeats the purpose of the round robin.
- Adding invitations to calendar
Google blocks automatic addition of invites to calendar. The warning set at the end of invitation is badly positioned. I would suggest enable the user to manually add the event in its calendar when the booking is completed. Doctolib, the biggest medical booking platform in France does it this way. I think it is the most convenient for the average tech user (targeted by this use case).
- The booking confirmation screen is a pain on desktop
on a 14 inch screen, pretty standard resolution, I only see half of the booking information. This page should be completely redesigned imho. As suggested at 4, it definitely needs an add to calendar button. The call to action to create a cal.com account is in the weirdest place.
- Maybe confusing booking page
I like this view the most but I find it weird that different times are displayed on the same height. I would prefer it fully displays the day schedule and shows the availability. Something as clean as the column view but with the organisation of weekly view
I find the fact that it displays the 24 hours in weekly view annoying. it should only display the span of your availability schedule (lets say 8 am to 8pm). This makes the page vertically scrollable and has bad UX.
I have plenty of other stuff I noticed everywhere but having the above fixed would be nice. I have the overall feeling that the information architecture might need a bit of rethink. I didn't think much about it but I would explore separating individual and team usage more in the interface.
Please note that I have not seen any platform doing correctly this use case at the moment. I think it is an opportunity.
What I really liked : OSS, impersonating a user, good reactivity on gh and support.
Thank you for all that @fluctuat. I'm adding the "needs approval" label as I will break the requests up into individual issues.
@fluctuat if you are looking to fast track this niche request, we could talk with our Growth Team about this to https://cal.com/sales
I am good. Developed it myself over individual booking links. It is a minor feature which makes a lot of difference. I have made my opinion that there are currently too many reliability issues with the platform before doing more niche features. Will gladly come back when it is a bit more mature.