My collaborators are finding the “Duration of booking” UI workflow to be confusing. I keep getting meetings booked for 15 minutes, because it is unclear that they can pick a longer duration.
I have changed my booking form to place the “Duration of booking” dropdown at the very top, hoping they will discover it better. (Personally I think the calendar UI should allow for a way to select meeting duration.)
But more importantly, perhaps, I found that it is impossible to change the duration of a booking. Ideally, you would want it to be a one-click change, like for emails:
If I try to rebook/reschedule, because the appointment itself is already scheduled, the calendar does not allow me to rebook/reschedule at the same time but with modified duration. But even if I am successful, it turns out that when you rebook an appointment, you can change everything except the duration.
I think it is really important that you address this problem.
Thanks for taking the time to raise these points on the forum about the duration of bookings.
I know exactly what you mean about the duration drop down being in the wrong place. We’ve a plan to move it to appear alongside the grid of times instead (which should actually present different options based on the chosen duration). Does that sound like a good improvement to you?
One potential workaround : our appointment types feature with types ‘30 minute session’, ‘1 hour session’. That works for some users.
On to rebook/reschedule, taking the two features separately:
For reschedule I can at least see strong arguments why not allowing the duration to change would be desireable (e.g. payment may have been made already, based on the original duration). Right now ‘reschedule’ does just mean ‘change the start time’ and nothing else. There are no plans to change this at the moment, partly because it might be a pandora’s box (should they be able to change all the other things, e.g. appointment type or team member?). But if this situation changes, I can imagine duration being the first candidate for extra control.
For rebook I had to check and was suprised to see that the duration is locked. Since we are now talking about a completely new booking, that doesn’t make any sense and I think this actually counts as a bug report. All the other fields are ediable on the booking form, why not duration? Thanks for reporting this! I will add it to our bug tracking.
Finally, one extra thing to note. Even though your collaborator has no control over the duration of the existing booking, you as the calendar owner can always change this for them. You can do this by manipulating the event direct on your calendar. Just edit the duration there and you should see all the information on the YCBM side falls in line with your change. Any emails we send for example will quote the updated duration/end time.
Many thanks for taking the time to thoughtful follow up on my post.
Fantastic!! That sounds like an amazing improvement to me, yes!
As always, I expect/hope that you will make this a customizable setting. One of the things I love about your product is how customizable it is. It allows one to really craft every aspect of the booking page—I think this is particularly important because some collaborators might feel like they are being demoted from booking by email. With the amount of tweaks you allow me to make, I am able to make sure the page looks exactly how I want to present myself. Thank you!
That’s a very good idea and I may I use it. My sense is that this introduces more friction than just showing the calendar. And someone my chose 1 hour, for instance, but not realize in so doing that they are blocking all availabilities, while if they had seen availabilities first it would have been clear to them that there never is more than 3 contiguous blocks of 15 minutes. In summary: This is a smart workaround, but it has major limitations that make the aforementioned new feature really welcome!
In fact, I completely agree with you. I was wondering earlier what the difference between “Reschedule” and “Rebook” is, and you’ve perfectly explained it.
My only point then is the following: You have a bug, which is that when trying to “Reschedule” an appointment, the calendar grid that is displayed for the rescheduling should presume that the slots blocked by the meeting being rescheduled are available (including the eventual padding slots). Currently, if a meeting is booked 2-2:15 with 2:15-2:30 as padding (for instance) and I try to reschedule it by 15 minutes, it is not possible to do so with your interface. So if I try to reschedule a meeting it has to be at a completely different time.
Thanks for letting me know this was added to the bug tracker.
This is really terrific! I did not know. Thanks for letting me know! Obviously, the two above mentioned bugs are less disruptive because you’ve just showed me I can override the times directly in my calendar. BTW, this really excellent bi-directional integration is yet another reason to love your product. Thank you!
Perhaps this is something that would benefit from being communicated more pro-actively to users.
At any rate, thanks a lot for your time, this product, and your continued improvements!
