Nick Balestra Personal Blog

Recurring Events - A quick UX exploration

Working on the ohanah app v2 - one of the challenge was to implement recurring events in the most simple, easy and elegant way as possible while yet to keep it powerful.

Here a first draft of making recurring events during the event creation process (can be applied to non recurring events as well, making them recurrings).

When creating an event they system will differentiate between the parent event and its recurring children. Meaning that you can edit all the recurring events at once (whole recurring seres editing) by editing the parents or just override changes on a per per event base, by simple editing each single child.

Login / Signup - A quick UX exploration

Working on the login - signup workflow I’m try to reduce as much as possible the steps in the process in favour of a better UX. For example I always hate to submit email / password and being notified that the combination was wrong, maybe when i just misspelled the email. Second is important to allow the user to move easily between login to signup.

first check if the email is a valid email string, if not contextually alert the user:

if the email entered is a valid email, check if it’s already registered in in the system if not contextually notify the user, with a quick link to register it (signup-up).

In the case the email is found on the system, show the user avatar inline so he knows with which identity is loggin in, and contextually show a remember me check box (otherwise in the other cases useless and therefore not needed to have it displayed.)

Input Date - A quick UX exploration

During the past days we tried to understand how to put together the best UX for inputing date and time online. While this may sounds easy few thing are to be taken into account:

1) People is used to the calendar methapor for inputing dates

2) Time format differ from Europe vs States

3) In our scenario the starting and finishing date/time just tell you about When of an event and as you can tell it in a single phrase, you should be able to input it on a single line too.

The above image is our solution to the problem and is about a mix of what @brianteeman, @rpijpers and @HilsCheyne also suggested via twitter chat about the topic. Also thanks @epic_bagel for linking me to the 37 signals article about the exploration due-dates in the to-do list in base camp.

A) Date: as in our scenario when people start an event they already know the date for it - thats why we kept the date picker calendar as minal as possible to quicken the process of input your desired date (for example no week, days labels)

B) Time: instead of going trough multiple drop downs, as you see mostly out there, we thought that a masked form (hh:mm) will be the fastest way to input the time, no clicks just type it! This allow to quick input time up to the minute ( if this have to be done through drop downs means a 60 element list just for the minutes ).

C) As not everywhere people use the same time format, we will show to the people in the countries that use the 12h format a drop down to select Am / Pm. All the other visitors won’t see it and are then just free to input the time in the 24h format without having to care about the am-pm.

This solution works really nice in our usecase-scenario and we are pretty happy with the outcome. Thanks to our awesome UI/UX designer @jonnotie to have putted together such an awesome solution and to everyone of you who discussed this on twitter. This quick post is a feedback in that direction.

If you have any thought just get in the loop: @nickbalestra