ScheduleUX Research-Registration

Improving the Registration Page for Research-Participants

May 25, 2021 • 4 min read

This project reviews improvements to the "Registration Page" where people can sign-up to participate in research-sessions.

ScheduleUX is a user-research platform with a focus on coordinating schedules and ensuring participant-eligibility.

ScheduleUX is a scheduling-service that handles screening participants and scheduling sessions for user-research. By automating the time-intensive, low-skills tasks necessary to run studies, ScheduleUX enables researchers to focus on the high-skill aspects of their work, including planning, conducting, and reviewing their research.

Automating the traditional duties of a human research-coordinator required designing a platform that could be used by any employee to schedule for any researcher, with any participant... and drawing the line between edge-case and use-case was a lot trickier than anyone on our team imagined. 🧐

Even before the pandemic, with a narrow focus of scheduling for in-person sessions in a typical “research lab” environment was tricky, and required making a lot of presumptions about our users in order to streamline the workflow.

After the pandemic hit, with researchers, coordinators, and participants joining from different locations and sometimes even from different time zones, we knew we needed to revisit our product vision.

We started by adding support for coordinating remote studies including special configurations for Zoom, Webex, Skype, Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Whereby, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.

Next we built a sophisticated admin-portal to help our internal team support customers, manage payments and subscriptions, take notes, and -if necessary- suspend suspicious accounts.

ScheduleUX has been around for a while and has gone through several design revisions to meet the growing needs of my customers.

The original page was bare-bones and served only the most basic needs for participants to provide their contact info, select a session, and agree to the participation requirements.

The prototype registration page — The *alpha-prototype* registration page

The v1 design update for the registration page — The *alpha-prototype* registration page

Over the years I’ve enhanced the session-selection component, the registration flow, the mobile layouts, and handling for studies with missing data. I’ve also created a feature for participants to add event-reminders to their calendars or to re-generate the reminders later if they need to.

v2 Design
Overview Tasks

In 2018, the brand was updated to use a fresh-looking neon-green and white color scheme. The Participant-Registration page was also updated to use a sidebar for registration tasks.

A mockup of the registration page — Study Overview

A mockup of the registration tasks — Study Overview

With the shift to remote-everything that came with the pandemic in 2020, ScheduleUX also shifted to support remote-research. The ScheduleUX now recognizes URL-formats for common video-call services including Zoom, WebEx, Google Meet, Skype, and more.

Customizing SUX

My research has shown that brand-recognition improves a participant’s willingness to register, so my 2021-enhancement refines and simplifies the design of the registration-page to enable researchers to customize the branding.

This update involved reworking the design to maintain necessary branding-priority (needs to be recognizable as “_____ via ScheduleUX” and not as a direct product of the researcher’s company), reducing the colors, considering the opportunities to simplify the branding-interface and reuse colors. and the accessibility requirements of maintaining adequate contrast.

v3 Design
Wireframes Update Custom

Work Completed So Far

Up-to-date work can be seen on my team’s Figma document.

Create a new UI for researchers to specify custom-branding colors
Update the registration pages to utilize custom branding if available
Create a new user-type so that participants can register for an account
Update all registration flows to differentiate between ‘Researcher’ and ‘Participant’
Add a new flow to collect demographic information from participants when they register
Update the Account page to allow participants to see or modify their demographic information
Add a new flow for participants to join the pool for a given study

Next Steps: New Registration Flow

Researchers have also been asking for a pool of participants they can choose from (rather than the current ‘first come, first served’ model) so that they’ll have better control over their demographic distribution and population-sampling.

The 2021 update will include updated flows where prospective participants can register with ScheduleUX and express interest in participating. If they’re selected, the participants will receive a link to come back and schedule a session.

Create a new UI for participants to see which studies they’re registered for
Create a new UI for researchers to review their participant pool and select participants
Create a new email template to invite selected participants schedule their session
Add a new flow for selected participants schedule their session
Add a new utility to notify returning-participants that they have not been selected yet

Thanks for reading. For more design honesty and maybe some wisdom, visit my portfolio, or offer me a job.

See ya’ later, Cowpoke.