Seven Improvements in Scheduling 2024

Let's start with the most important thing you need to know about our latest scheduling release. It's got a ton of improvements and new features.

✨ New Look & Feel

Every element of the calendar has been redesigned to be faster and more intuitive:

🔑 Key actions like cancel and reschedule are easier to find

🎯 Filter the calendar based on quotas, screener questions, or Pool tags

⏭️ Toggle between day, week, month, and list view with keyboard shortcuts (d,w,m,l).

⇧ Shift-select multiple events to delete multiple times


1️⃣ Study Details

This is a centralized place to define the basics about your study. Head to the sidebar and click Study Details. Keep in mind these elements will be shown to participants to help them understand what they are signing up to participate in:

  • Type of Interview - Select 1:1 Interviews, Group Sessions, or Mixed (both 1:1 and Group). You can enable backups as well, etc.
  • Timing - choose between manually add times (which is the old 1.0 approach), or new options for rolling times or a fixed date range. You can also setup buffer between events and other advanced options. Use new rolling dates for continuous discovery ✨.
  • Incentive - define the incentives for this study, including currency/country. You can always edit this later.

2️⃣ Facilitator and Location

In that side same sidebar, click Facilitators and indicate if it's you that will be conducting interviews, someone else on your team, or if you need to invite someone new to your account. Please note you must have a seat open in your account, but they can be a collaborator seat. The most important change here is that each facilitator has their own location, which can be in person, Zoom, custom URL, etc.

2.1 Participant Facing Name

For the safety and privacy of your researchers, you may want to control the information that participants see, so this can be anything you want:

2.2 Location

Each facilitator has their own location, so if you only have one, it's pretty straightforward. If you have multiple facilitators on a single study, you can assign different locations to each facilitator:

3️⃣ Roles

There are two new roles on the scheduling sidebar:

  • Observer (Viewer) - this is basically a guest for your interviews who can receive separate calendar invites from the participant with no P.I.I. They do not need an Ethnio account and it can be any email.
  • Collaborator - someone who can connect their calendar account (Google or Outlook) to Ethnio for automatic availability. 

4️⃣ Communication 

You can send details to confirmed participants and invites via email, SMS, calendar invite or all three. You setup all these channels of communication under scheduling > communication. The default language should work for most studies, but be sure to review the SMS options for invite and details.

💬 SMS scheduling 

Send all invites and details via text message as an optional communication method.

📱 Mobile friendly formatting

The structure of all communications is designed to render nicely whether it's a text message, email, or calendar invite. 

5️⃣ Availability

For the facilitator or collaborators, you can automatically hide times from participants that are blocked any one or more calendars. Alternatively, you can simply view blocked times from your Google or Outlook calendars in Ethnio. Basically, save the trip toggling back and forth between multiple calendars to check availability. You can even ask collaborators to connect their Google or Outlook to Ethnio and they never have to login again. 

  • Automatic availability - basically this automatically hides blocked times for one or more facilitator or collaborator 

  • Show blocked times - view one or more facilitator or collaborator availability from their GCal or Outlook directly in Ethnio

6️⃣ Quotas

Head to Responses > Quotas to try creating soft quotas for your study. You can use screener questions, Pool tags, or location and setup multiple conditions to define each quota. 

There's a new centralized module to collect, track, and reference consent from participants. Head to Home > Consent to add new consent types. You can use our form builder with checkboxes and signatures, integrate with DocuSign, or embed any Adobe Sign form.


7️⃣ Quick Settings & Autofill Sample Participant

From the top right, you now have access to toggle the invite step on or off, which is a brand new way to skip straight to confirming participants if you are using calendar invites. 

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