Bookers Deserve Better: Why We Built Our Online Scheduling Tool to Prioritize the Booking Experience

What do we mean when we say “Bookers Deserve Better?”. 

The phrase was originally coined by our long-time colleague at YCBM, Kate Reynier—who’s done many tours of duty in customer support, marketing, and now product.

Here’s what we mean: in the crowded world of scheduling tools—used for everything from nail salon appointments to software demos—the experience for the booker (the person actually doing the booking) has consistently fallen down the priority list.

Many tools are built with the organizer or business in mind, leaving the booker with a clunky, confusing, and overly generic experience. Too many clicks. Too many steps. And sometimes, just as much back-and-forth as the emails these tools are meant to replace.

But here at YouCanBookMe, we’ve always believed that a great scheduling experience starts with the booker—the actual end-user.

That’s why we’ve made it our mission to put the booker front and center in everything we build.

We’ve had this philosophy from the very start. 

In fact, it was in 2007, when our CTO and co-founder, Keith Harris, first rolled out our sister-app, WhenIsGood.net, that the original ‘booking grid’ was born. 

Keith dreamt up the simplest, most intuitive interface to solve one core problem: pick the times you’re available.

When YouCanBookMe launched four years later, that same concept carried through. The grid now showed when the account holder was available to be booked—but the logic stayed the same: make it effortless for the booker to choose a time and get it on the calendar.

When some of our (ahem) bigger competitors were launched a few years after YCBM—they followed exactly the same form—a grid of available times you could choose from.

Since then, this structure has since become the standard in scheduling tools. But many of those tools stopped evolving it. And that makes sense—if you didn’t invent it, you might not fully understand why it works the way it does.

But we did. And that’s why we never stopped improving it.

We never stopped designing the best booking experience we could. 

Today, the grid is just one of many options. You can start with a calendar view, or use the agenda view—a favorite for those who want to scan all available times in the coming days and weeks. You can jump to the next available slot or zero in on a specific day.

Availability can now be set down to the minute, fully flexible and responsive to how you work.

All these changes lead to one outcome: when someone books through a YCBM grid, they get an easy, personalized experience—designed by the account holder to work exactly the way they want.

And because we’ve made it easy for bookers, guess what? They book more! 

Runway Coach and YCBM customer Jessica Gregory took part in our ‘booking challenge’ earlier in the year to see what she could do to improve her booking experience. Here’s what she said:

Once I customized my entire booking page—we started with just one, and then I kind of played off of the one and expanded it to the other pages—it's exponentially changed the growth of my business. So, in the first quarter, from January to March, I've increased sales over 43%.”

All of these upgrades were built on top of our original vision: to make it as easy as possible for bookers to navigate your booking page, find a slot, and book with you.

To make booking pages both engaging and on-brand, you can customize them with any color, add background images, and include logos and helpful information for bookers. We’ve also improved booking forms—now you can show or hide questions based on previous answers, display pop-ups with extra details, or link to your terms and conditions.

One of our favorite customers, Emily Claire Hughes, couldn’t have put it better:

I love that I could customize it. I love that it had personality. I love that it was more fun than Calendly. Everyone has Calendly. I find Calendly to be really boring. And it looks a bit like it's stuck in the nineties/early two thousands. So I was sold. I was like, ‘Great, I can make it pink. Tell me nothing else. I'm fine.’”

Over the last 10 years, we’ve carefully considered every feature request—always asking ourselves how we can design it in a way that truly makes life easier for the people using our pages: the bookers.

But for us, the crowning glory—the ultimate example of what bookers deserve—is better matching for their availability, not just the person they’re booking with.

We call this two-way scheduling. It means that when someone visits a YouCanBookMe page, they can choose to overlay their own calendar. The system then automatically shows only the times when both people are available.

Without it, the burden is still on the booker—they have to check their calendar, cross-reference options, and potentially go back and forth to find a time that works.

Yes, we know that other tools can also do this to some extent. But you either need to create an account within that tool or you need to hand over tons of data. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that none of the other options work on mobile! 

YCBM is the only tool which has engineered ‘overlay’ deep into our logic, which means anyone on a mobile can connect their calendar app and view times they are both free. Magic.

A longtime champion of YCBM, Accountant Alex Falcon Huerta, put it this way:

Overlay is an awesome feature that YouCanBookMe has.” As she tells her clients, “Look, it's going to be much better if you use my link because you're going to see when we’re both available.”

There’s another, often overlooked—but critically important—way we’ve built our grids and booking pages with bookers in mind: accessibility. Any booker using any kind of screen reader or other accessible support is able to easily navigate a YouCanBookMe booking page. 

While this might not come up for every booker, it's essential in contexts like higher education, where there’s a legal obligation to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In these settings, accessibility becomes a legal and ethical requirement.

This might not affect every booker, but in settings like universities, accessibility is both a legal and practical requirement. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), any software used by students must be fully accessible to everyone.

Unfortunately, most scheduling tools don’t meet accessibility standards, as their legacy systems and complex calendar interactions make support difficult.

But we didn’t let that stop us.

I am so proud that YouCanBookMe booking pages are fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 standards. As our Head of Design, Rob Lafratta, puts it: “When we think about designing new elements for our booking pages, we always think ‘accessibility first’ so the pages are loading in a way that is going to be much easier for screenreaders.”

A tattoo artist and YCBM customer, Daniele Lugli said in an interview with me:

One of my clients, she is a professor at RMIT University working specifically with information technology and interfaces. And she said it was a very well streamlined flow to book. Very intuitive. The interface was very pleasant.” 

Finally, we have another catchphrase inside YouCanBookMe: “Scheduling that speaks your language.” 

And we mean that in every sense. Yes, YCBM leads the industry with translation support for over 40 languages, but we sweat all the details—the timezones, the time-date formats, and the calendar configurations.

Whether you’re in a half-hour offset like Newfoundland, using right-to-left languages like Hebrew or Arabic, or need a fully localized experience in Japanese from start to finish—we’ve got you covered.

Edward Ernebäck told us recently:

What made us choose YouCanBookMe was that it was one of the only softwares that offered a Swedish language, but also had a lot of the functionalities. So a lot of the other programs that had Swedish as the language were very limited in what they could offer. So it was a combination of the Swedish language and all the different other functions that are integrated.”

We’ve truly built a tool for bookers all over the world.

• Bookers should be able to overlay their times and find a matching time on any device—without having to create an account.
• Bookers should be able to see only the available slots, with no endless clicking or scrolling—just pick a time and book.
• Bookers should be able to enjoy their booking experience—with beautiful interfaces and professional design and colors.
• Bookers should be able to easily select appointments types and requests, and have calendar events automatically added and updated for them.
• Bookers should be able to use ApplePay and GooglePay, and get texts to remind them of their appointments and follow ups.
• Bookers should be able to load their booking pages quickly and accessibly.
• Bookers should be able to read everything in their own language, their own timezone, and their own time and date formats—with zero confusion.

In short, the entire point of using an online scheduling tool isn’t just to make your life easier—it’s to make your bookers’ lives so much easier.

Our ambition? To create a booking service that is so intuitive and gorgeous to use, that when someone sees you’re using YCBM, they breathe a sigh of relief, because they know they’re in good hands.