Finished But Not Finished-From Concept to Capstone Project in Ten Weeks
“People need to a calendar that conforms to their life, not the other way around”.
That was the big epiphany I had after interviewing people to understand how they used mobile calendar apps to schedule their time. Their current mobile calendars didn’t completely solve their problems. One interviewee had several calendars because she had different emails connected to different accounts (Ex. Eventbrite, Meetup, etc.). Another interviewee didn’t like the look of her calendar and couldn’t get holidays to be displayed.
They used workarounds to make do with their current mobile calendars. One interviewee changed all her accounts to one email address to get all her events on one calendar. One gentleman only used his work computer to set work appointments because it had access to his work contact list and he didn’t want to invite the wrong person to a meeting. Because his work mobile phone at his last company required a 16 digit security pin to use, he would invite himself to his appointments so he could share his travel information easily with his wife and be able to access his appointment information later from his personal phone.
Research to Concept
This was the beginning of My Custom CAL*, mobile calendar app. People have different activities, events, and priorities and their calendar should be built around their lifestyle not pre-designed settings. Their calendar needed to be: Adaptable, Personal, Modern, Purposeful, Colorful, Glanceable, and Simple. This research and perspective led me to develop My Custom CAL*, a calendar mobile app prototype, for my capstone project to earn my Interaction Design Certificate.
Putting Ideas to Paper
My first paper prototype was rough (Figures 1 &2), but it led to a few of interesting discoveries in testing. I was adding more customization than testers wanted. Testers wanted to know if they could view more details when available, but they didn’t necessarily want to label different events (Express vs. Detailed) or even color code them.
Look What They Do
I learned this by user research principle: “Watch what a user does not just what he/she says” because none of the users pointed out issues with naming “events types“ and color-coding them, but they didn’t use the feature when interacting with the prototype.
Making Something Intuitive Is Hard
A big challenge throughout the iterations was how to make clear that users could preset more than one event reminder. For example (Figure 3) Although I used a checkbox style list, which allowed users to choose up to five options, testers thought they could only choose one event reminder. Several testers even pointed out that they wanted the option to add more than one event reminder.
I finally found a solution when I added numbered Event Reminders with dropdown boxes. (Figure #4)
During testing, users preferred having more flexibility with the event reminders. Some wanted to be able to add their own event reminder with a specific time frame instead of the preset times (Figure 4).
When testing on a later version of the wireframes, testers asked for the option not to preset event reminders. (Figure 5)
Final Prototype — Finished But Not Finished
I created wireframes and low-fi clickable prototypes in Balsamiq, but that limited my ability to test out complex interactions. For the final prototype, I used Axure to add visual design elements and fine-tune interactions.
While I’m pleased with the progress of the My Custom CAL* prototype for my capstone project submission, I’m not 100% satisfied with it. While I captured the spirit of “customize your calendar to fit your life” in My Custom CAL*, it’s more of an improvement than innovation. It still needs to break free of the box (traditional calendar format) to be truly innovative. Maybe a future side project.
