Rethinking a calendar
People use calendars regularly. A very high percentage use them every day more than once.
Calendars can help you organize your daily routines and keep track of your “to-do list”. Plus, it is a great tool to manage your time.
Calendars might look like simple applications, but when you start researching, you discover that the topic becomes pretty muddy. The methodology that I followed to try improving the user experience when using a calendar was: the double diamond, a process for which I had one week to do research and one week to produce the final prototype.
I decided to enter the subject starting with a desk-research. I started out with a benchmarking to study the market, detect possible competition, and analyze what they were doing. I dived into google play and started downloading all sorts of calendar apps to try them out. I wrote down notes about performance, features, aesthetics and so on. I also looked into the differences between mobile and web calendars to understand how they were synthesizing information. I not only focused on calendars, and looked up other tools that could have features with the potential to add to the final product. I looked up motivational apps like: BeWet, Drink Water Reminder and Water Drink Reminder; sports apps like Runastic and Sportstracker and other tracking apps like Ovuview.
I did a small netnography going through the opinion sections to gather valuable findings directly from the users.
In the midst of all the opinions I found important to point out that users wanted to:
I did a selection of apps that are well valued by users and have a good range of interesting features: Xiaomi’s OS calendar, Google Calendar, Ovuview, Sportstracker and iOS calendar.
I sketched out lightning demos about features that were unique to dig a little deeper into them. Google calendar users loved the month overview with a clear differentiation between tasks. Xiaomi’s calendar has a unique minimalist style. iOS Calendar users found incredibly useful to be able to get notified according to the time it would take them to travel to the place of the event they are setting up. Something that I did not include in my lightning demos, but I definitely wanted to keep in mind for the future design, was the clear differentiation that the app Ovuview makes of past and future days. It’s important to say that it’s one of the few (if not the only one) that makes this division.
After this first contact I wrote a series of research questions to find valuable content, in order to ask users afterwardS:
I conducted a series of interviews and made a form to see other people’s opinion on their use of calendars and their performance. I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on users thoughts about the current products on the market and what they feel like they are missing.
I wrote a form that I passed around to help me get more findings about the topic.
78,6% of the people I interviewed use calendars almost every day. That is a lot. So I think it is important to give such a tool the attention it deserves.
The form revealed that most users like to use calendars to manage work and personal events. An interesting insight I got out of the forms was that 50% of the users used their desktop operating system calendar and 92,9% used their phones operating system calendar. Out of these users, 35,7% use the calendars brought by their email provider. This means that an astoundingly high number of users don’t look for better calendar apps.
When they are asked if they think they are missing a more complete calendar app 35,7% state “yes” and 28,6% claim “maybe”.
When asked about features 100% of users agree that they would like to be able to cross out past events or done tasks. All of them agreed that they wanted a better general overview and sharing of events with other users.
After all this work, I created my user personas, to help me put all the information in order and understand users needs a little better. Even though none of the users I interviewed used calendars to track sports or diets I decided to include that feature in one of my user personas, because I aimed at changing that with my future proposal.
People wanted to be able to
To define the features of the future solution, I started out comparing the different overviews of the calendars I previously chose. I dug deeper into the features that users liked about these apps.
I proceeded with an Heuristic analysis to determine which of the features that stood out the most, could be improved or simplified. One of the most significant to point out was the “goal selection” of Google Calendar, a wonderful feature that allows users to keep track of their goals. Google calendar currently distinguishes between events, goals, and reminders. This is something I intend to implement but trying to simplify the process, by reducing the number of steps to avoid the cognitive load of users. I also want to work in the consistency and standards in this regard.
I made notes of the apps feedback messages, to see what I needed to add to my design. Something really important to me was working towards the heuristics of aesthetic and minimalist design as some of the calendars out there look really rough and crowded. When adding features it gets really difficult to keep a clean design.
At this time of the research, I conducted a MoSCoW to have a better overlook and help determine the important features that needed to be built in the app. The main features that I chose to include in the app following users needs were:
I also thought it could be attractive that users could customize their own calendar to keep track of challenges (like drinking more water); or physiological tracking (like their period).
I worked on rough sketches to help organize the future solution and choose the best visual way to capture it. The most difficult thing during this part of the process was adding features without overloading the design. I developed the first wireframes, following the rough sketches, to help visually prioritize what screens where necessary to be designed and which not.
I dug a little deeper into the idea of making a clear differentiation between the past, present and future days in the monthly view. For this, I created a medium fidelity prototype and made some tree testing to see what solution was more visually pleasing for users.
I had to think a lot about ways to include the cross-out feature. I did more sketches around that specific feature to see all the options available to arrange this.
Last but not least I created a quick branding system for the new calendar app. The color palette was created trying to find a mix of soft, neutral colors. A thing that was taken into consideration when choosing the color range was running away from the classical blue palette, that is very typical for digital designs.
The logo shows a goat as a symbol of perseverance. The name “chivo” is a synonym in Spanish for “cabra” that means “goat”. The style and combination of the image and the typography make a young and dynamic logo. The typography chosen for the app is Roboto Medium and Regular, mainly because of its good legibility in digital formats but also because it works fine with the overall look and feel of the branding.
Chivo is a new calendar app that allows you to keep track of the things you care about in an easy way.
Chivo allows creating separate calendars according to your preferences. You still get a classic overview of all your events and goals, but now you can focus on one of your categories if you choose to do so. This means that, if you want to only focus on your gym calendar you can do so, or your work calendar…
You can find your calendars clicking on the hamburger menu on the top left. I made some tests with real users on the interaction design and created an accelerator enabling the user to change between calendars by scrolling left or right. In most of the calendars when scrolling left or right you are changing month; while with Chivo you scroll between calendars. With vertical scrolling, the user can change between months.
When creating new events I added the already existing option in iOS calendar of getting notified accordingly to your travel time.
I paid attention to the heuristics and created feedback messages to keep users informed about what is going on in the app. If you are in the gym calendar and you are creating an event, but you are saving it for the same day and time you have another event in your Work calendar, a message will show up letting you know. Within this message box, you can choose to create it anyways or to cancel and modify the date.
Chivo also distinguishes between events and goals. Events are classic calendar inputs, while goals are flexible inputs that can be postponed. Chivo collects information from your goals and shows you the data graphics so you can keep track of how you are doing.
As mentioned above, I simplified the process of creating a new goal. I reduced the number of steps/screens creating overlays. This allows the user to always go back to the general goal-edit screen and see what he/she is doing.
Following the users wish to be able to cross-out events and goals, I implemented a feature into Chivo that allows you to mark the things you get done gradually. This feature adds a progress bar to the calendar that helps the user have a clear view of the completion status of his/her daily tasks.
Because of time constraints, I had to leave out two features that could be really interesting to implement in the future: being able to add things like challenges and being able to track women period.
I never would have guessed, that creating a calendar app could be so challenging. But I guess that simple things are like that because they have been designed with great care.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Rethinking a calendar
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