Perhaps we should test the designs and ask people to perform tasks,
to see if the extra visual meta-data actually helps people find
things on the calendar and get a sense of their overall schedule.
e.g.
You are looking for flight information your spouse sent you for a
trip they're taking next month.
You need to pick a good week to go out for a long lunch with an old
friend from high school. Look through your calendar to figure out
which day next week is best for you.
===
Allowing users to selectively pile on more meta-data is neat idea. I
wonder if there are ways we could do it without asking the user to
explicitly go to the preferences panel.
e.g. not display event status unless they start using.
On the other hand, the comps I have up assume users are using all the
features. The lozenges will look very uniform if the user:
+ Never uses event status
+ Doesn't add events to multiple calendars
+ Doesn't stamp events as tasks, etc.
In other words, it may not look so bad on a real calendar with real
data.
===
If we were to get rid of meta-data to display, do we have any
candidates for what to get rid of?
Mimi :o)
On Apr 14, 2006, at 5:47 AM, Sheila Mooney wrote:
I agree, the lozenges look a bit busy. I have many back to back
1/2hr or 1 hour meetings so I run into similar issues where they
kind of glob together visually. This is mostly because of the line
on the left side.
We could consider giving the user a preference to have more and
more meta-data on the lozenge. Out of the box, I could imagine
something very minimal. This way, people who don't use event status
or events on multiple calendars, don't have to see that on the
event lozenge. We do has this information in the detail view.
Another exercise might be to prioritize the meta data on the wiki
page Mimi put together - what nuances do we absolutely have to have.
I would also like to get a more accurate swag for the solid banner
at the top. It may be hard but what does that really mean...what's
the cost? If it's really is the right visual design we might need
to make that choice.
Sheila
On Apr 13, 2006, at 5:46 PM, Mitchell Kapor wrote:
My initial reaction is that these designs all try to cram too many
visual distinctions to represent the different nuances of event
meta-data. I'd rather have a cleaner and more legible look even
if it meant given up some of the nuances.
On Apr 13, 2006, at 5:28 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/
EventLozengeImprovements
So of course, just as I replied to matt saying that the @time and
anytime lozenges wouldn't change very much, Mitch's email
prompted me to have another go at the event lozenges in the
calendar, which prompted me to draw a laundry list of all the
pieces of meta-data that should/could go on the event
lozenge...which turned out to be rather long.
Note: Apparently it is hard to draw the solid banner at the top
of the event lozenge, which is why we didn't consider this design
for 0.6 (a la iCal) (Alec, correct me if I'm wrong)
Mimi :o)
On Apr 5, 2006, at 9:59 AM, Mitchell Kapor wrote:
I'm now dogfooding 0.6.1. I've put away iCal, at least for a
week. So far, so good, as they say. My assistant, Esther Sun,
keeps my calendar, so my primary use case is frequently
consulting it to see what I have to do next, what the current
day is like , or how busy is a specified interval in the
future. I have a fairly full calendar and it is not unusual to
have 4 or 5 consecutive appointments of 30 or 60 minutes
duration each.
The visual separation between multiple consecutive events is not
up to par. The problem is that it's hard to tell where one
event ends and the next begins. The shape of each event is
rectangular on the left side and nearly so on the right, with
only a very small curved cut-out at the top and bottom edge. I
think it would really help if the event "lozenge" was actually
more lozenge-shaped so that a series of consecutive events would
read more as a set of oval lozenges stacked on top of one
another rather than a stack of slightly defective legos._ _ _ _
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