What is the Scheduling Tool?
The Scheduling tool manages and shares your availability for moderated studies, so participants can only book times that fit your schedule while staying in sync with your calendar provider. You access it from the Calendar tab in your study.Why It Matters
Your calendar stays the single source of truth. Once connected, Great Question reads your real availability and pushes booked interviews straight back to your calendar — no separate system to keep updated. Participants only see times that actually work. Booking limits, buffers, and notice windows are applied automatically, so no one can book a slot you can’t realistically take. Teams scale without manual assignment. Collective and Round Robin attendee structures let panels or rotating moderator pools share a single booking flow instead of coordinating by hand. Fewer no-shows. Automated reminders go out to both participants and your team ahead of each session.Common Use Cases
How to Set Up Scheduling
Work through these steps to get your calendar connected and configured.- Connect your calendar. Connect your calendar provider — Google Workspace or Microsoft, one at a time — under Settings → Integrations. Then select the calendar you want to use from the study’s Calendar tab.
- Adjust your calendar view. Click View to configure display settings, including visible hours, weekday preferences, and which event types to show (moderator and observer events, busy or free status).
- Configure your preferences. Set event details such as duration (in 15-minute increments) and location type — Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person, or a custom link. Then choose an attendee structure — Standard 1:1, Collective, or Round Robin — and add moderators. Set your scheduling dates and hours, timezone, booking limits, buffers between events, and minimum or maximum scheduling-notice restrictions. You can also enable optional features like livestream for observers and time proposals for participant flexibility.
- Preview. Click Participant preview to confirm that available times, timezones, and formatting all appear correctly.
Attendee Structures
Note: Round Robin has two assignment modes: Availability picks whichever moderator is free, giving participants the most times to choose from; Fairness distributes bookings evenly across the moderator pool instead of always favoring whoever’s most open. Choose Fairness if even workload matters more than maximizing available times.
Scheduling with Multiple Moderators
Collective and Round Robin studies share a few settings across the whole moderator pool that are easy to misread as per-moderator:- Booking limits are set per study, not per moderator. A daily or weekly booking limit applies to the study’s total bookings across every moderator combined — it doesn’t give each moderator their own separate cap.
- Every moderator’s calendar needs to be connected and up to date. Because availability is drawn from each moderator’s own calendar, one moderator with a disconnected or out-of-date calendar can make the whole study’s availability look inconsistent, even if the others are wide open.
- Reassigning a moderator on a booked session updates that session’s calendar event individually — it doesn’t change the Round Robin rotation for future bookings.
Managing Bookings
Once scheduling is live, you can send invites, manually schedule participants, edit existing bookings, reassign moderators, review proposed times, and use Troubleshoot mode (available for Standard 1:1 only) to see why time slots aren’t showing as available. On the participant side, self-service rescheduling and cancellation are only available while your calendar integration stays actively connected. If that connection breaks, participants lose the ability to reschedule or cancel themselves until it’s reconnected.Editing a Booking
- Open the participant’s booking from the study’s Participants tab.
- Choose Edit booking details.
- Update whichever fields need to change — date, time, duration, location, moderator, livestream, or observers.
- Save your changes. Great Question updates the calendar event and notifies attendees of the change.
Changing the Moderator
- From the study’s Calendar tab, find the scheduled call and select the current moderator.
- In the Switch moderators? dialog, choose how to make the change: keep the study as a 1:1 and hand it fully to the new moderator, or add the new moderator alongside the existing one by switching the study to Collective or Round Robin.
- Click Confirm.
Manually Scheduling a Participant
- From the study’s Participants tab, select the participant you want to schedule.
- Choose Mark as scheduled from the participant’s action menu.
- Select a moderator, then choose a date and time.
- Confirm. The participant is marked as scheduled, and a calendar event is created for them.
Reviewing a Time Proposal
When a participant proposes alternate times, review them from the study’s Participants tab under Review proposed times. To accept, select a time and click Accept & schedule. This runs as a background task rather than instantly, so give it a moment before assuming it didn’t work — and it requires the participant’s contact information to still be valid, so it will fail for a participant whose email has bounced or who has unsubscribed. To decline instead:- Click Decline.
- Confirm in the Decline proposed times dialog.
Adding Observers
Observers are added the same way as moderators, in the study’s Calendar tab preferences. They receive their own calendar invite, separate from the moderator’s and participant’s invites — but only once they’re added as an observer on the session itself; being given access to the study or repository isn’t enough on its own to trigger an invite. You can also enable livestream so observers can watch without a direct calendar invite at all.Best Practices
Before opening scheduling. Connect your calendar and confirm your timezone under Calendar → Availability, then use Participant preview to verify what participants will actually see before inviting anyone. Set realistic notice windows. Minimum and maximum scheduling-notice settings count every day, including weekends — a 1-day minimum notice set on a Friday still allows Saturday bookings for Monday. All selected weekdays share one time window. You can choose which days you’re available, but they all use the same start and end time — there’s currently no way to set different hours for different days (for example, mornings only on Monday and afternoons only on Wednesday). Leave room in your availability window. Session duration, buffers, and booking limits all subtract from your open slots — if no times are showing, that combination is usually why. Keep your booking window ahead of you. Bookable times only extend as far out as your maximum scheduling notice (and your booking window’s end date, if one is set). If new times stop appearing further out, extend one or both of these rather than assuming your weekly hours were lost — the weekly pattern itself doesn’t change; it’s the window it’s projected into that needs extending.Provider Requirements
Note: Zoom and Webex are not yet supported as scheduling conferencing options.
Troubleshooting
| Issue | What’s Happening | How to Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A reschedule doesn’t show up in Great Question, Microsoft Teams, or the moderator’s calendar | The reschedule can land in one system before it propagates to the others, so GQ, the video provider, and the external calendar briefly (or occasionally persistently) disagree. | Treat the study’s booking record in Great Question as the source of truth. If the external calendar or video link still hasn’t caught up after a few minutes, reconnect the calendar integration; if the mismatch persists, contact support with the participation ID. |
| Duplicate or stale calendar invites | A rescheduled or canceled session can leave a second invite behind, or an old video link can keep showing after the details changed. | Confirm the current time and link from the study in Great Question, then delete any extra or outdated invite from the external calendar. Contact support if new duplicates keep appearing. |
| Google Meet or Microsoft Teams link never populates | The conferencing link failed to generate for that session — a different failure mode than the link simply being stale. | Open the booking in Great Question and check the location field. If no link has generated after a few minutes, edit the booking to regenerate it, or switch the location type and back. |
| No time slots appear, a specific day looks blocked, or the study shows full despite open availability | These all trace back to the same availability math: session duration, buffers, booking limits, and scheduling-notice settings are combined to produce open slots — any one of them can zero out a day without an obvious reason why. | Use Troubleshoot mode (Standard 1:1) to see which setting is excluding a given day or time, then adjust duration, buffers, or booking limits in Calendar preferences. |
| Booking limits don’t match what you expect, especially on Collective or Round Robin studies | Daily and weekly booking limits apply to the study as a whole, not to each moderator individually. | Check the study-level limit rather than expecting a per-moderator cap. If the limit still looks wrong, confirm it wasn’t changed indirectly by editing the study’s overall participant/recruitment limit elsewhere. |
| Availability seems to reset or disappear in future weeks | Your weekly hours pattern doesn’t change week to week — but bookable slots only get generated as far out as your maximum scheduling notice and booking window end date. | Extend your maximum scheduling notice or booking window end date rather than re-entering your weekly hours. |
| Wrong or confusing timezone displayed, for either you or the participant | Timezone is set once as part of your availability and then converted for each participant’s local view — a mismatch anywhere in that chain shows up as a confusing label rather than an error. | Confirm your timezone under Calendar → Availability, and have the participant confirm theirs from the booking confirmation. If either party sees the wrong offset or abbreviation for a date, contact support. |
| Moderator calendar conflict | The moderator’s calendar isn’t connected, so busy events aren’t respected. | Reconnect the moderator’s calendar under Settings → Integrations. |
| Participant can’t reschedule or cancel themselves | Self-service reschedule and cancel links only work while the calendar integration is actively connected. | Reconnect the calendar integration. If the participant still can’t self-serve, reschedule or cancel the booking manually from the study. |
| Error accepting a proposed time | Accepting a time proposal runs as a background task rather than instantly, and requires the participant’s contact info to still be valid. | Give it a moment and refresh before assuming it failed. If it still hasn’t gone through, confirm the participant’s email hasn’t bounced or been unsubscribed. |
| Observer isn’t receiving a calendar invite | Observers only get invited when they’re added as an observer on the session itself — study or repository access alone doesn’t trigger an invite. | Add the person as an observer directly on the booking, not just as a study collaborator. |
| Participant didn’t receive a reminder email | Reminders wait for the session’s video link (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.) to finish generating before sending. | Confirm the meeting location’s conferencing link generated successfully, then resend the reminder manually if needed. |
Still need help? Contact us at support@greatquestion.co — median response time is 19 minutes during support hours.