Product Teardown 17 — Calendar on Apple, Google and Smartisan
This post is about calendar app. Before writing this, I never realize that calendar is one of the most important apps on my phone. It’s such an important productivity app that I cannot even live without it.
I am going to analyze and compare three calendar apps, Apple, Google, and Smartisan, with a focus on design, product features and how to make it better.
Design
App Icon
Icons from these three developers are great. All of them clearly convey the meaning of the app, and are easy to recognize and remember. Unlike Google and Smartisan calendar, Apple’s calendar shows the right date and week information on app icon.It’s the best among the three.
The reason Google and Smartisan don’t use Apple’s way, I think, is that Google and Smartisan make the calendar app as a stand alone app, so every Android user can download and use it. Apple, on the other hand, controls its own device so it makes more deeper integration. On Smartisan’s own smartphone T1 or T2, calendar not only shows the right information, but also has some animation when date changes.
User Experience
Let me focus on a few things here.
What’s the experience of getting started or signing up?
All these calendars do a good job on signing up new users. For Google, user just need to add a google account. Smartisan actually automatically import your google account and also allows users to add some local account. For Apple, everything is setup when you first setup your phone.
How easy to use was the app?
All calendars are easy to use. Users won’t have any problems with creating a calendar event.
How did you feel while exploring the app?
In terms of exploring, I think Apple does the best job, followed by Smartsian, and Google. Actually, Google seems have the worst exploring experience.
First glance tells a lot of details.
Apple organizes information very well.
- month and date are shown clearly with different colors
- Days that have a calendar event will have a dot under that day.
- If users moves to a specific day, that day is highlighted and is very easy to identify
- a quick summary of events during that day is also shown
- Moving among days and months is very easy.
Smartsian is also doing a good job.
But if you look at Google, I believe you would agree with me that Google calendar sucks. It just doesn’t have a focus on organizing the information. Day information is small and hard to see. Therefore, it is useless. A big red button at the right corner draws too much attention. On the exploring page view, this button should lay low. Besides that, all the events are shown under the day, as a result, if users see his calendar in a month view, it would be total mess.
The number one thing that a calendar should do is “showing the right month and date information”. I think Google’s calendar clearly lacks focus and prioritization.
Product Features
As a productivity app, calendar app should empower people to get things done.
As a user, I should be able to use my calendar app to:
1) create, modify or delete an event for a specific time and date
2) accept or reject an event for a specific time and date
3)get notification before the event
4)search an event in my calendar
5)learn my behavior and help me organize my life
Creating a calendar event is easy in Apple and Smartisan. In Google’s calendar, users need two steps, because Google’s calendar allows users to create not only event, but also reminder and goal, which I will talk about later on.
Three calendars have some unique differentiation.
Apple focuses on creating a quick and lite event. All the basic settings are shown at first place, while if users need to add more options, such as time, repeat, users can go into each row and do the setting.
Smartisan is almost the same as Apple, but focuses on creating a user friendly event. For every event, users can choose an event icon to indicate this is a meeting, a shopping, or a movie event, etc. This is a small improvement, but a good one. The thing that Smartisan doesn’t do good is the “all day” row. By default, All day is selected. this is exactly the opposite of users life. People create more multiple small events than big all day events.
Google calendar makes collaboration easier. One of the best features I like is Add attachment from Google Drive. You can add a document from your google drive, or a document other people shared with you. This is particularly useful when more and more people are using smartphone or tablet for work. For example, a sales people can create a review meeting with client and include a draft contract for client.
Setting a time is easier to do in Apple and Smartisan calendar than in Google calendar. Apple arguably has the best feature. Smartisan also has a good design, but that weather information is redundant. It seems helpful but actually isn’t. A general weather information, not one for a specific time of the day, is not going to help users very much. Lastly, Google has the most complicated time setting feature. It also looks confusing. Google could do better.
Deleting an event is much easier in Smartisan calendar. In Apple or Google calendar, you have to go into each event to delete it. But in Smartisan, simply swiping right on each event, you get a list of options: forward, favorite, done, delete. You can easily delete an event from there.
All three apps provide search function. Search in Apple calendar is very esay: click search button and type the word you want to search. In Google and Smartisan, you have to go to a different tab to use the search function.
Although users need three steps ( go to tab — click search — type word) in Google and Smartisan calendar, I believe they offer the right search feature.
The reason is that users don’t search calendar as often as they do for emails. So search function in calendar is a less frequently used feature. It’s better to move search function somewhere else, but use that precious space for more frequently used features.
For example, Apple can put a week/month / 3-day toggle button to replace the search button. User are more likely to see what’s events he has this week or for the next three days.
Google’s unique feature.
Google calendar has a unique feature, called “Goal”. This feature helps users to set a few goals in their lives and tracks the process so that users can work towards their goals. Google has a few pre-defined goal categories, such as exercise, build a skill, organize my life, etc.
Another unique aspect of Goal in Calendar is that users don’t need to set a time for their goals. Google simply finds a time slot in your calendar, uses that as a starting point, and gradually learns users behavior to find the right time for users. This is a very very smart move because it 1) loads off a lot burden from users — you don;t need to find a time, google will find a time for you 2)learns users’ behavior along the way so that Google can user better data to serve users 3)is a strategic fit for Google Now whose vision is to give users information even before you ask for it.
I believe this feature, with the right marketing and user education, can be a killer feature in calendar.
Improvement
Collaboration
People are using mobile devices for work more and more often. Collaboration is a big thing for work, from sending files, co-authoring a document, to sharing work streams. One of features of calendar I think that would help users is to allow adding an attachment from Google Drive, One Drive and Dropbox. Target users are students and corporate employees, who book meeting quite often. This feature would allow them to create a calendar invite on the phone, invite people and add a document for the meeting.
Automatically adding phone number when creating event on the phone
Many times, you want to send a calendar invite to someone and you want that person be able to contact you in case of emergency. When creating an event on calendar, calendar app should be able to automatically add “my phone number” if I chose the option. So if that person is late for the meeting or has emergency, he or she can contact me by phone.
Remove weather information and add a check weather button for each event
General weather information is not useful for users. For example, if you have a meeting at 1:00 pm, it doesn’t matter today is rainy or clear. What really matters might be what’s the weather look like at 1:00pm. Calendar app can have an API to get access hourly weather information from weather app. When user go into detail event, he can check what’s the weather look like at the meeting time based on the meeting’s location.
If the calendar becomes smarter, it should be able to give appropriate weather recommendation based on time and location.
