webOS Calendar App

The design team at Palm was responsible for all built-in apps along with system-wide behavior and components of webOS.

One of the apps I worked on was the Calendar app. The Calendar app (along with all the other apps that we worked on) also had a phone version. The first version of the app for the TouchPad had already been designed when I joined the project, so I was the design lead and interaction designer for the second version of the app. I paired with a visual designer and worked with a researcher to get some quick validation of our concepts.

While the Calendar app on webOS for phones had been around for a while, the introduction of the TouchPad had spurred some changes in the phone apps to align with the new TouchPad. In particular, the TouchPad introduced “panels”, a common component that allowed apps to layer sheets of information on top of each other to form a navigational stack. The majority of TouchPad apps used panels, but the first Calendar app did not. One of the goals I established for the updated version of the app was to incorporate panels. This not only made the Calendar app more consistent with the rest of the system, but also added the ability to focus on one event or day while still seeing the greater context of the user’s schedule.

The other major feature that we added to the app was an “Agenda View.” We were inspired by the iPhone and Android’s calendar “List Views,” but noticed some shortcomings.

The list view is data rich and is perfect for quickly seeing what’s next on a user’s schedule. However, it isn’t as effective at seeing the length of meetings, spotting gaps in a schedule, or being able to easily add a new meeting at a given time. To help address that, I added in a small strip to represent free time. This strip could then be tapped to trigger the creation of a new event.