One thing that I dislike about classic calendar apps like Google Calendar is that they typically have a really nice single-day view, and a really nice full-month view, but nothing in between. Or at least nothing really ‘at a glance’ useful.
When it comes to work, the most useful view is the detailed daily view, including precise hour slots. Which meetings do I have coming up and when exactly? Should I remember to go home a bit earlier to pick up the kids? Etc.
But when it comes to personal life outside work, the more natural question is: what’s coming up this week? What’s coming up the coming weekend? Both for practical reasons (who’s picking up the kids? Any plans my partner made that I have to be mindful of not to double-book?), and for just looking forward to any fun plans coming up: am I going for drinks/dinner with a friend? Did we pick a place yet?
Similarly, when trying to pick a spot to plan ahead for say, dinner or drinks with an old friend, it’ll typically be somewhere in the weeks to come you are looking.
Day ‘blocks’, not exact hours
Zooming in, I find that when it comes to organising social plans, we think in ‘blocks’ like evening or afternoon: are you up for drinks Wednesday evening? Wanna go running this weekend, perhaps Saturday or Sunday morning? Wanna go for lunch?
The precise hour doesn’t really matter as much when making plans. In this age of messaging, that’s just a quick convo the same day. We agree in advance to meet up for dinner together in the ‘evening’, and then during the day we send a text ‘how about we meet at the restaurant at 7PM’?
For building a calendar app, that’s great news. Calendars are notoriously hard to properly implement, which is why there’s a zillion front-end libraries for it. But as a first approximation, if I can get ‘weeks’ and ‘morning-noon-afternoon-evening’ blocks in there for a V1, that feels already a bit less daunting.
Translating into a UI
So we want to make weeks and morning/noon/afternoon/evening blocks the natural ‘resolution’ to view your calendar on. How might this look, in a format that’s still workable within the small-screen constraints of mobile? How about something like this:
Still feels a bit cluttered, but at least in a view like this it’s pretty convenient at a glance here which weeks and evenings are already pretty filled up with plans, and which are still open.
(note that this already is a view with work meetings and recurring ‘non-social’ stuff like kid hobbies filtered out — a prerequisite I’d say of making any ‘social life’ calendar view not super cluttered)