Improving a User Experience- Google Calendar

I use Google Calendar constantly. Left to my own devices, I have the self awareness and planning capabilities of an 11-year-old boy. Everything in my life goes in Google Calendar. My entire to-do list lives in reminders. Confession: at the height of the professional craziness in my last career, I had daily reminders set up to remind myself to eat dinner and brush my teeth. When a former co-worker revealed to a group of us that her boyfriend asked her to move in via Google Calendar invite, while everyone else was picking their jaws off the floor, I thought to myself, “Oh that’s a really good idea. I hope she added a reminder 30 days prior to cancel her own lease.”

Despite the fact that Google Calendar runs my life, it has some usability frustrations, especially if, like me, you’re using the app on your iPhone.

Creating an Event

I need to add an event to my calendar because I’m getting drinks with a friend. I click the plus sign, select “event,”

and start typing “Drinks with Madison.” Google recognizes a Madison in my phone and links her contact details to the event. I add a location and Google recognizes the bar down the street. So far, really good, but then I go to select the time. I select “today” and Google provides some suggested times, but lists intervals of 30 minutes between now and 3:30 with no obvious way to enter the exact time in this screen.

Now I love day drinking, but society generally accepts happy hour to be a post 5 pm activity. I have to abandon the flow I had scheduling this event and return to the main page and edit the event to add the correct time.

An easy fix to this usability issue is to add a signifier to the user on how to add a specific time from the first screen to allow them to complete the entire task in one flow without interruptions.

Setting Notifications

Google Calendar defaults to set up two notifications for your event including an email ten minutes before your event. Generally, ten minutes before an event, I am already en route and don’t need a reminder of what I’m doing. These emails clog my inbox and are completely useless. Now if there is a way to change these default settings from the app, I haven’t found it yet. As a result, I spend a lot of time turning off these notifications for individual events. Being able to change the default settings would be a great solution, but I would also accept being able to disable these notifications in the same flow as scheduling an event.

Setting a Reminder

Now let’s try to schedule a reminder for tomorrow. I follow the Mindy Kaling school of thought regarding physical exercise, and I try to go for a slow jog every other day. I also need to remind myself to do this incredibly routine activity.

I open reminders and start typing “go for a run” and Google helps me out by autofilling some common reminders. I select “go for a run tomorrow.”

Although, I’ve specified what day I want to be reminded, Google does not automatically set the reminder for tomorrow. It defaults to the current day. I need to follow up by adjusting the date and time for my reminder. A way to improve usability would be to connect the entry “tomorrow” with the date of the reminder, similar to how the process flow works when creating an event.

I want to make this reminder reoccurring. I click “Does not repeat” and it opens a menu with some standard intervals. I click “Custom…” and select “ 2 day” and add an end date of 10 occurrences. Now what?

There is no option to save or confirm so I click the back arrows in the upper left hand corner through two pages, and now I’ve clicked the “x” in the upper left hand corner of the main page instead of clicking “Save” in the upper right hand corner. I’ve closed my reminder without saving and I have to start all over again.

There are two design fixes to this issue: create a save button from the reoccurrence screen, or move the buttons so that the you have to switch sides of the screen to close an event without saving.

Delete an Event

Lastly, if you want to delete an event, you open the event and you see the following screen:

Nowhere on the opening screen do you see an option to delete the event. You click the Edit button, thinking the option must be in the next screen, but you scroll all the way to the bottom and still find no option to delete the event. You have to select the 3 vertical dots button in the upper right hand corner. Once you click here, you find that the only menu option here is to delete the event. A unitasker is not a great use of space or effort!

Now for some sketches.

This is what the current page for creating a new event on Google calendar looks like:

And here’s what a page could look like that creates better signifiers to users where to enter dates and times.

And here’s a page that would follow the flow and prompt users to create custom notifications.

Two simple edits to a user experience that will greatly improve the usability and ensure that I show up on time.