This is a simple UI critique of a simple feature burried in Google Calendar. Here’s the original:
It’s a relatively simple form. It’s certainly not bad but I think it could be better. Here’s a quick mock up:
Here are the key design points:
- The body of the form has “What, When, Where” but doesn’t have “Who” if you’re having a meeting it stands to reason that the people attending are pretty important. I always felt that having guests hidden in the right didn’t make sense.
- The majority of meetings are measured in duration. 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, 2 hour, all day, etc. It’s much easier to pick a common duration and allow “custom end time.” as a fall-back rather then making users select end times.
- Most meetings don’t repeat. Logically this is a secondary consideration. This can be moved to the secondary area on the right.
- Checking availability should be a secondary area action as well. Plus over on the right there’s more space to present availability in-line.
- It should be really easy to preview a location with a map.
- The current UI makes it difficult to add people to a meeting without the system automatically emailing them. You have to place names into the description area. Having a simple checkbox to email guests could solve this.
- There are a lot of simple UI 101 alignment things that can make the UI look cleaner and simpler just by lining fields up.
- The right hand side could be extensible with new modules, plug-ins, ala Google Labs.
My last startup, GeoSyncUp, was focused on adding two new features to Google Calendar.
1. using the location from your mobile device, add your travel time to the selected notification time. Example:
you are currently 15 minutes from the location of the meeting and the notification was set at 5 minutes, the notification would actually go off 20 minutes before the start of the meeting.
2. you would see if other guests of the meeting (who also own the app) were going to be late. Example:
one of your guest is 25 minutes from the location of the meeting but the meeting is in 20 minutes the app would let you know that the guest is running late.
I hope someone would build this. we never did.