I've taken one more pass at it. I'm going to hold off after this one,
give Priscilla a chance to take a whack at it as well.
Rather than getting rid of metadata, I've tried to de-emphasize both
the event status and collection colors. However, there are subtle
nuances that will hopefully translate into a vague feeling of:
+ This area of the calendar seems less dense (more FYIs and
tentatives without banners, more @time lozenges that are white)
+ This area of the calendar seems more dense (more confirmed events
with banners and bright text)
Again, most people won't see these variations if they don't use event
status.
Most event lozenges won't have rainbow colors because they won't
belong to multiple calendars.
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/
EventLozengeImprovements#FourthIteration
Mimi
On Apr 14, 2006, at 2:53 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Alec Flett wrote:
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.
+1 - no matter how useful it is to have all this meta-data there's
an aesthetic aspect as well - if just 5 events on my calendar make
the UI very busy, then the app doesn't look fast and clean, it
looks cluttered and hard to use. why can't we make use of
mouseovers/tooltips/etc to show more detail?
I don't think we should give up on showing up more info per event
just because we haven't seen good screen shots so far. From an
information design standpoint, there is an interest to cram as many
data as possible per lozenge so that the user will develop the
skills to "grok" the visual picture at once without having to hover
to reveal tool tips or click to display detail views (it's called
using "small multiples" in Tufte talk). Think of it as productivity
building up by using the tool.
I think that's where Mimi come from and I actually think it's the
right thing to do. That being said, it's *extremely* difficult to
come up with a pleasant design for this and I have to say that, so
far, I haven't seen any. I also believe that this can be done
without sacrificing simplicity of look and feel and visual
elegance. Design should look simple without being simplistic.
We need more ideas here and more, much much more screen shots... :)
Cheers,
- Philippe
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