Rally's native scheduler lets you configure interview scheduling directly within your study. Manage the scheduling settings for an Interview or Group Interview study from the Scheduling tab within the study builder/editor.

Note that you can pre-configure scheduling settings for future use within study templates, or duplicate an existing study to conduct similar research with the same scheduling configuration.

Event Setup

1. Select your preferred Calendar app from the options connected to your account (Google, Microsoft 365).

2. Add an Event Name and Event Description for the interview calendar event. We recommend using personalization tokens to customize outreach, such as including "First Name" or "Interview Length (minutes)".

3. Set the interview Duration in minutes or hours.

4. Specify the Location:

   • Select Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams for online interviews. One of these options is required to enable observer rooms.

   • Select Custom Location for in-person interviews or to use an alternative video conferencing tool. Add the link or address in the additional Calendar Location text field.

   • Select No Location to exclude locations during scheduling.

Assignment for Interview studies

1. Choose your Scheduling type:

   • Standard 1:1 — The participant meets with one interviewer.

   • Collective — The participant meets with all interviewers at once. Rally only shows participants times when every interviewer is available, which may reduce the number of available slots.

   • Round Robin — The participant meets with one interviewer from a rotating pool. Rally shows a slot as available as long as at least one host is free, then randomly assigns an available host. This maximizes available slots.

2. Add Interviewers:

   • The study creator is added as the first interviewer by default. Admins and managers can assign another Rally user as the interviewer on someone's behalf.

   • For Collective and Round Robin studies, select + Add teammate to include additional interviewers.

     Rally users with the Observer role can be added as interviewers to include their availability in scheduling. Developers cannot be added as interviewers (they don't have calendar connection capabilities) but can be added as guests.

3. To include attendees without affecting scheduling availability, add them as Guests. Guests are included in all interview invites regardless of their availability. Select + Add teammate to search Rally users, or + Add email address to add someone not on Rally.

4. Meeting account: Choose whose connected Zoom, Meet, or Teams account to use to create & host the interview.

   • Defaults to each interviewer's own account when Standard 1:1 or Round Robin scheduling type is selected.

   • When using Collective scheduling type, you can choose which interviewer's account to generate the join links from.

   • Note that the person who's account is used to create & host the interview will also be the user who will have permission to admit the observer room bot to the session if observer rooms are enabled.

Availability for Interview studies

Set your available dates & hours for your interviews, and preview the booking calendar that participants will see.

Live preview

As you adjust your availability settings, you will see a live calendar preview on the right side that displays the time slot options available for booking over the next 7 days.

• You can adjust the timezone, which host's calendar is being previewed, and click forward and backward by week.

• All slots indicated by a pink box with a checkmark are available for booking, and whited out portions are unavailable. Hover over a slot to see time information.

• Click Full calendar to view a larger and more detailed version of the availability, and click Preview to view the scheduler from the participant side.

General availability

1. Edit the interview length if needed. This is initially set under Event Setup.

2. For dynamic scheduling, you can also set the available date for scheduling.

   • Fixed date range: Choose a start and end date. Participants trying to access the scheduler after the set date range has passed will see a "We're Fully Booked" page. You can always return to update or extend the dates by editing the study.

   • Rolling date range: Specify the number of days into the future available for booking.

Advanced

1. Buffer time: Optionally block time to allow for preparation and wrap-up. You can set your buffer times to apply to before the interview, after the interview, or both.

   Note that buffers apply to all calendar events, not just Rally interviews.

2. Minimum booking notice: Specify your preference for how far in advance an interview needs to be scheduled to avoid last-minute booking surprises and allow time to prepare. Time slots within the minimum booking notice window won't be displayed to participants. Defaults to 2 hours.

3. Time slot intervals: Set the frequency of available time slots on the booking page. For instance, with 30-minute intervals, time slots are available at 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, etc. Smaller increments will provide more available options.

4. Daily and Weekly interview limits: Allows limiting the number of interviews to book in a given day or week for the study. Leave blank for no limit.

   • These rules can effect each other. For example, daily interview limit = 1 and weekly interview limit = 4 means that only 1 interview can be booked each day, until a total of 4 are booked for the week.

   • Interview limits are not currently available for Round Robin scheduling.

Weekly schedule

Select between Dynamic and Manual scheduling availability.

• Dynamic scheduling uses the interview host's connected calendar and availability for booking.

  • Click Edit availability next to an interviewer to change and configure their personal availability. Note that when you save updates here, they will not be limited to this study but will apply globally for the interviewer's availability across the workspace.

  • You can add Date overrides as needed to add availability on specific dates, reduce availability on specific dates, or blackout dates with no availability. Add date overrides with specific times to update that date's available time slots, or add date overrides with no specific times to mark that date as unavailable.

• Manual scheduling allows you to define a single schedule available for the host(s). Click +Add availability to select dates and add times for participants to be able to book.

• Avoid meeting conflicts can be set for both dynamic and manual scheduling. This setting determines how the Rally scheduler treats the interview team's other calendar events when booking new interviews.

  • Default - Don't book over Busy events: Busy events are not able to booked over. Events where the host is marked as tentative, free, or unconfirmed will be available to book over.

  • Strict - Don't book over any events (Free or Busy): Any booking will block that time as unavailable on the scheduler.

  • Off - All events can be booked over: This option will not allow participants to schedule over Rally interviews from the same study, but may allow participants to schedule over Rally interviews from a different study. This can provide increased availability, but proceed with caution!

Availability for Group Interview studies

Group interview booking is configured using custom time slots.

1. Click + Add time slot to create a new time available for participants to book.

2. Select your desired Date, Start Time, Duration, and Limit of participants (can be adjusted later). Adjust the Location and Interviewer as needed, add Guests as desired, and click Create time slot to create this option.

3. Once you've created a slot, it will show under Availability, and will be labeled as a Draft until you publish the study and/or your changes.

   1. Click the edit pencil icon to make edits to the time slot, the trash can to delete the time slot, or the duplicate icon to duplicate the time slot.

   2. Once you publish your edits to the study, you can no longer edit or delete the time slot from the study builder. If you need to delete a time slot that has been published, you can do so from the Study overview by navigating to Time slots > click the three dots to the right of the slot > click Delete time slot and confirm.

Advanced

Customize the messages a participant sees after booking an interview or once the study's interview limit has been reached.

• Confirmation page: Edit the message shown once a participant successfully books a time.

• Fully booked page: Edit the message shown when the study is closed, paused, or you have no more availability within the date range.

Observer room

Optionally, enable a virtual observer room to invite stakeholders or teammates to view a live stream of your user research interviews without distracting participants. Enabling observer rooms requires having either Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams set as the interview location in the Event Setup section.

Once scheduled, interviewers will see both the interview event and observer room event on their calendar.

Learn more about Observer Rooms and Observer Room Settings.

FAQ

How do I book an interview manually?

You can manually book interviews on the study overview page to bypass host availability, interview limits, and other scheduling restrictions, or to log past interviews or interviews outside of Rally to ensure a participant's history stays up to date.

Learn more about how to manually book interviews.

Why is the study scheduler showing more or less availability than expected?

You can view availability by navigating to Scheduling for your study and clicking Preview to see the time slots shown to participants. You can also click Full calendar to view a more detailed view of your scheduling calendar.

If you are seeing more or less availability than expected, here's how to troubleshoot:

Check the following on your connected calendar:

• Less availability than expected: Full-day events, accepted OOO events from colleagues, and recurring meetings marked tentative or free can all reduce availability.

• More availability than expected: Focus time on Google Calendar defaulting to non-Busy status, and OOO time not set to auto-decline meetings could show times as available that you want to block off.

Check the following settings in Rally:

• Avoid meeting conflicts determines how Rally considers your existing calendar events when checking your calendar and booking interviews. If you're expecting specific time slots to be available that are not showing up, we suggest checking your conflict settings alongside your calendar.

• Date overrides represent dates when availability changes from normal working hours, which can mean reduced or added availability on specific dates, or blackout dates with no availability.

• Buffer time before & after interviews can help ensure you have breaks between meetings, but will limit available time slots close to existing calendar events.

• Minimum booking notice hides time slots that are within this set time range; if you have a 24 hour minimum booking notice, no same day availability will be shown.

• Daily interview limit enforces a maximum number of interviews that can be booked within a given day. If a set limit is met, no more time slots will show for the day.