One of the most consistently annoying and time-consuming tasks for the average business person is scheduling meeting times. Whether face-to-face or via phone, the slippery problem of pinning down a time for a meeting is painful, even if only two people are involved, and when a large group is involved days may pass -- and dozens of emails sent -- before a quorum emerges.
In my case -- as a soloist working with dozens of clients and organizations (program committee and advisory board meetings are the worst) -- it is my idea of hell.
The problem is that everyone seems to be using different, uncommunicating solutions for their calendars -- Outlook, Google, iPhone -- and there is no established protocol, either socially or at the software level, to actually deal with this problem in a consistent fashion.
I have always wondered why no simple, well-designed, and open architected Web 2.0 solution to this has come along. I have fooled with more takes on this problem than I care to admit, but never hit one that would fit into my model of everyday tool use.
Doodle, a Zurich-based company, has a tool of the same name which seems to solve my scheduling problem. It treats the scheduling issue -- "when can we have a meeting that fits all (or most) of the schedules of this list of people?" -- as a specialized sort of poll. The poll is set-up by one person, and sent along to the rest, who 'vote' on the various alternatives, and at the end, some compromise date and time is selected.
After creating an account at www.doodle.com, I supplied a title and a description of the desired meeting, and then I am shown the screen below, which uses a familiar calendar metaphor to select various days for the hypothetical meeting.
Once the days are selected, I am presented a tabular interface (shown below), where I can carve out possible time slices for the meeting. A nice feature copies whatever has been typed into the first row into the others. Note also the timezone support, which is critical for me, but for groups meeting locally can be shut off.
Doodle supports various polling options for capturing participants' sentiment on the various options. (Note that Doodle is also a general polling tool, for short and uncomplicated polls, and the same polling options are supported for non-meeting polling, as well.) Here I have selected the well-named 'Yes/No/IfNeedBe' option for the poll, which allows respondents 3 discreet choices for each provisional time slot.
Doodle has a simple approach to distributing the poll: the owner/creator gets a URL that can be emailed to participants, which requires no passwords or creating accounts. This may be too open for some secretive and security obsessed types, but it works fine for the average get together of the PTA or meeting with your accountant. At the moment, Doodle does not provide a means of secured polling, although that certainly might be in the works, and suggests a possible freemium road to revenue for the company.
Here's what the participant sees after clicking on the URL:
Participants can set up their own Doodle accounts, which makes sense if you are using the tool frequently, since Doodle will manage the information associated with all polls you are involved with, via your email address. This also allows the user to make their own polls.
Participants can add comments to any poll, so this supports a conversation about what time to have lunch, or where to go (a paired poll that I expect a lot of people create: one a schedule poll, the other a subject poll).
The owner of a poll can edit it, delete it, delete the comments, and see the history. All participants can subscribe to the RSS feed, or integrate with various apps, like Facebook, Google, Netvibes or others. And, once the decision has been made as to when to meet, participants can add the event to their calendars.
So Doodle is a well-done, tightly focused application. And this could be used as the case study of how a Web 2.0 app can emerge: a clearly defined headache that falls outside the neat boundaries of existing applications or social patterns, solved by a clean insight.
