Interactive Prototype : List or Grid — What’s best for arranging a meetup?
What was our scenario again?
Our user-study, as described in the previous post, focused on the scenario whereby a user may want to schedule a casual meetup with a friend at a restaurant. This covers the “when” aspect of designing a dining app. Therefore, the meetup to be scheduled was not assumed to be a special day (eg: birthday); instead, it was more of a casual impromptu scheduling, such as when two friends have not met in quite a long time, and would like to meet up to catch up.
List vs Grid
The findings of our user study, described in the previous post, indicated that “Day of the week” emerged as the most important attribute when people are in the scenario of planning for a casual upcoming event, particularly contrasting to “Specific date in the month”, which ended up emerging as the least important attribute!
Linking with Mental Models of Users
Hund et al provided that vital link between calendar interface style, and the user’s mental model (most important scheduling attribute). Calendar search was faster in list view, particularly when users were searching for dates (Hund et al., 2014). However, searching for days emerged as being faster with the traditional grid calendar layout (Hund et al., 2014).
Interactive Prototype : Information Abstraction of Restaurant Attributes
There are two interactive prototypes showcased in this post (here). Prototype 6.1, shown on the left, depicts a date and time-slot selector which completely disregards the concept of a traditional calendar month. Prototype 6.2, shown on the right, takes on a more conventional grid-styled interface that is probably more familiar to you, as you would have seen it on the traditional paper-styled calendar, or even on device operating system user interfaces, such as iOS.
In addition, do take note that these prototypes were developed to feature another aspect of the user study — the fact that users, when placed in this particular scenario, also care significantly about the events which they have already planned for a particular day. Therefore, existing events in the user’s calendar are featured in the time-slots. These events can be pulled from calendar services, such as Google Calendar, Outlook.com, or iCalendar. There is also a switch to enable/disable this feature, and it is turned on by default.
Implications
For our chosen scenario, the traditional Gregorian-styled Grid-View Calendar emerged the winner, and should therefore be the preferred calendar interface if you’re designing an app which will help people schedule casual dates and meet-ups.
References
Hund, P. M., Dowell, J., & Mueller, K. (2014). Representation of time in digital calendars: An argument for a unified, continuous and multi-granular calendar view. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 72(1), 1–11. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.09.005
Previous Post : Calendar Interfaces in Dining Apps
