Keeping track of time

My first memory of a calen­dar is from my first year at school. I was 7 years old and my life had pre­viously con­si­sted mainly of play­ing with LEGO and watching car­toons on TV. Sud­denly it revol­ved around somet­hing else: rou­ti­nes, divi­ded into chunks of time. I had been intro­du­ced to a schedule.

Today, 25 years later, I find myself rea­li­zing how impor­tant the calen­dar is to me and so many of us living life in a soci­ety. I’m thin­king of sche­du­les, mee­tings, appoint­ments, birth­days and all the other things it can keep track of to make our lives easier. Calen­dars have the great fun­c­tion of kee­ping people orga­ni­zed toget­her with each other.

One pro­blem I have with calen­dars on the com­pu­ter and in smartp­ho­nes today is the limi­ta­tion as to the way I’m allo­wed to view the data. Most calen­dars only per­mits me to view events divi­ded upon a day, a week or a month, and that’s about it. The pos­si­bi­lity to view events in detail over a time-period of a year is uncommon.

But what’s the pro­blem with this, you might think? Sure, most of us don’t care. We don’t ques­tion the way things work, because it simply just works. But I have had this nag­ging fee­ling that the calen­dar could be a much bet­ter tool, and it makes me think that it might be pos­sible to improve it!

So, how can the digi­tal calen­dar be improved?

The obvious answer is that there is a lot that can be done bet­ter. But I’m going to focus on the thing I would love to see rea­li­zed in a calen­dar app.
In my pro­fes­sion, I use Google Calen­dar a lot, and I almost always view events in the month-by-month view. Every now and then I find myself get­ting a little bit upset with the month view when I’m try­ing to get an over­view of events that hap­pen close to the turn of the month. The flip­ping between months back and forth doesn’t give me the best expe­ri­ence for my purpose.

The digi­tal calen­dar is desig­ned around the same constrains as a phy­si­cal calen­dar. In the phy­si­cal calen­dar you view one month at a time, mainly due to the size of a calen­dar. (If you were able to write notes on a calen­dar with mul­tiple months dis­played the calen­dar would become quite large and we would be back to in history when we used scrolls!)

And here comes the pro­blem. In real life you are in con­trol of the page turn, and can quite easily go back and forth between pages. In the com­pu­ter, the press on a but­ton (or in some case scroll up or down) makes the page turn.

A solu­tion to this pro­blem could be an infi­nite calen­dar.

This design is based on Google Calen­dar. All the fun­c­tions that you can see in Google Calen­dar isn’t repre­sen­ted here simply because I didn’t find that it had a pur­pose for me when I use my calen­dar. The design is made for showing so many dates as pos­sible, based on the height of the brow­ser. Ins­tead of tur­ning a page you simply scroll up or down to view events before and after the view­port. This could also work very smoothly and natu­rally on a tablet.

I’ve also added a list of upcoming events, posi­tio­ned to the right of the calen­dar. This is an adjust­ment to the calen­dar that suits me per­so­nally. It gives me an over­view of the upcoming events, but I don’t have to switch the calen­dar view to see them.

Just to be clear, this design is just a moc­kup and there is of course (always) more you could do to bet­ter demon­strate how this design could work. I hope you at least get a clue of what I’ve tried to con­vey, though.

While we’re on the mat­ter of the calendar…

I should per­haps share some of my thoughts on the ugly duck­ling.

Apple is famous for lots of things and one part of that fame is because they are known for their atten­tion to detail in design. Steve Jobs and head desig­ner Jonat­han Ive have been cre­a­ting pro­ducts and gui’s the last decade that really has moved GUI design for­ward and is often copied from other com­pe­ti­tors. Altough Apple cre­ate mag­ni­fi­cent things there is one excep­tion – Apple iCal.

The design of the calen­dar appli­ca­tion has been ques­tio­ned ever since the rele­ase of Apple’s latest ope­ra­ting system, Mac OSX Lion. Most of this cri­ti­cism con­cerns the grap­hic design, such as the leat­her tex­ture and torn paper, details that are sup­po­sed to incre­ase the authen­tic feel of the appli­ca­tion. (Desig­ners espe­ci­ally love to hate this skeu­morp­hic design.)

Just as with Google Calen­dar you are restric­ted to viewing events per day, week or month. But wait, you can actu­ally choose Year as well! That’s great! Or is it?
Per­so­nally I don’t have that many events in my calen­dar, but if we take a look at the Year view a couple of dates in Janu­ary are yel­low. So there is obviously somet­hing plan­ned during those days. But what is really plan­ned those days? Do I have seve­ral events on each day, or just one?

This view actu­ally doesn’t say anyt­hing more than that there  is somet­hing hap­pe­ning on a date. I have to click on the date to see more, so for me, this view doesn’t do any good. My point here is that the infor­ma­tion pro­vi­ded in this view doesn’t help me with my desi­red wish to ha a bet­ter over­view of my upcoming appointments.

Con­clu­sion

I admire both Apple and Google, I really do. I do like their respective calen­dar apps, but as with so many other things in this world, I would like to see some improvements.

If you were to choose per­haps you would say that I’ve mis­sed some fun­c­tion that you would have changed, given the oppor­tu­nity. Anot­her per­son might say that we’re both wrong and there is anot­her thing that should be changed to suit his or hers need.
We are all dif­fe­rent and can’t always get what we want – but we can always strive to make a change.

A spe­cial thanks to @Henrik_Eneroth for discus­sing my calen­dar issues with me!