How many hours have you spent in your life scheduling meetings with others? When we did our research, we learned that it takes an average of 8 hours to schedule a single meeting.

That’s very frustrating and time-consuming as we all have better jobs to do, like working in Figma, preparing for meetings, managing stakeholders... but often, we end up just scheduling meetings.

Back in 2019, in a world without ChatGPT, we decided to train and build our own AI assistant to make scheduling meetings with each other much easier.

We started with a prototype developed by a freelance designer, which, in retrospect, was poorly designed. Nevertheless, this was our starting point.

To validate our idea, we turned the initial prototype into a working app and introduced it to potential users. Here’s what we learned:

On the positive side, we confirmed that scheduling meetings is indeed a time-consuming task.

However, no one wanted to use our app due to several issues:
• No one wants to spend time typing and interacting with the AI.
• The feedback from the AI is unclear.
• Our NLP is super bad (obviously... as we didn't have that much training data at that point).

After weighing the pros and cons of each concept, we decided to combine the best elements of both. We retained the typing interface, which allows users to flexibly type in their requests, while simultaneously introducing a smart composer to help users type faster.

This overall experience has helped us increase the System Usability Scale (SUS) rate by 45% and significantly enhanced user satisfaction.