Stuart Tett

Design Engineer

Boomerang Meeting Poll

Designing a group scheduling flow, from proposing times to booking the meeting

My role: Product design · Interaction design · Front-end engineering
Project year: 2025

I designed Meeting Poll for Boomerang for Gmail, helping groups propose times, compare availability, and book a meeting. My work spanned Figma exploration and prototyping, production front-end development with the team, and the final styling audit.

Four proposed meeting times selected around existing calendar events.

Proposing times around an existing schedule. All product screenshots and recordings show the shipped feature.

Starting with customer demand

Boomerang already offered meeting scheduling, but didn’t support group polls. Colleagues tested demand with a placeholder “Group Poll” button, then surveyed customers to gather requirements.

I translated that research into Figma designs and a prototype. We did a couple of hallway tests, and I collaborated with company leadership on direction.

Organizing creation into three steps

I mocked up a single-screen approach and we tested four steps. Putting everything together competed with the calendar; separating optional settings gave less-used controls too much prominence and made the flow feel fragmented to the team.

I brought those settings into time selection. Primary controls sit at the top of the left column, with optional settings below and the calendar as the main working area. The final three-step flow removes a separate settings screen, at the cost of a denser time-selection step.

1. Event details

The first creation step, with fields for the meeting title, calendar, location, and description.

Establish the meeting details before choosing times.

2. Time options

The second creation step, with four proposed meeting times selected around existing calendar events.

Choose proposed times around existing events, with optional settings alongside the calendar.

3. Invitations

The third creation step, with a shareable link and an email composer containing the poll preview.

Share the poll by link or email. The animated preview appears inside the invitation composer.

Explaining an unfamiliar invitation

Boomerang's invitation includes a poll image. Recipients see updated results when they reload the email.

We wanted to call out this feature while organizers created their invitations. But people mistook the realistic preview for the actual poll. I designed a more abstract demonstration: responses flip into place across the poll, showing how the image changes as people vote.

Responses flip into place in an illustrative preview of the email poll.

The animation explains participation without reproducing an exact recipient view. It also creates a moment of delight before sending. I implemented it in JavaScript, adapting split-flap animation techniques from references.

Revealing optional controls when needed

The optional settings reveal their additional controls when enabled. A voting deadline opens date and time fields; automatic booking reveals the available conditions. This keeps the initial settings column compact while leaving the requested controls available.

Additional fields appear with the setting they belong to.

Refining the duration control

I animated a clip-path to slide the blue selection between durations without changing the control’s layout. Choosing Custom reveals inputs for specifying a different meeting length.

The selected state moves between durations; Custom reveals additional inputs.

Comparing the group's availability

For voting, I explored a Calendly-like approach to choosing time options and a Doodle-like matrix for comparing responses across a table. The team chose the matrix. It was also familiar to customers who used Boomerang for other scheduling needs but relied on Doodle for group polls.

The benefit is visibility: organizers can see who said yes, maybe, or no, and who hasn't answered. A total of yes votes alone doesn't tell that story. The cost is density as the number of participants and proposed times grows.

A participant responds to proposed times in a matrix alongside the group's existing availability.

Individual responses stay visible across the proposed times.

Keeping booking beside the decision

The organizer's view uses the same availability matrix. Selecting a time highlights its column and reveals the Book action alongside the responses that support the choice.

Selecting a proposed time highlights its column and reveals the Book action above the participant responses.

The selected time, its responses, and the booking action share one column.

After launch

After launch, one user described Meeting Poll as faster than Doodle, but wanted to offer more than our limit of 20 time slots. Another requested support in Boomerang’s native iOS app. The feedback was encouraging, while pointing to limits in the number of options and where people could use the feature.