5. Calendar Interfaces in Dining Apps
Posted on Thursday, 16 March 2017
#Post #UserStudy #CalendarInterfaces #Time
Introduction — Why do we need a calendar in dining apps?
Not all dining apps have a calendar interface. You may be asking… why do we even need a calendar for a dining app?
As seen from our previous user studies, the ability to plan for a subsequent event emerged as a one of the top-most requested features that users deemed as important to have in a dining application. Therefore, a scenario was crafted, to include users utilizing the dining app to plan for an event that was to be held in the near future with one or more other friends.
The introduction of this new scenario led to a host of many new questions, such as to figure out when this scenario is most likely to take place. Would users likely be in a real-life situation and then want to use the dining app to plan another meetup in future? Or maybe they’re most likely to start this activity when they are chatting online?
For now, the question we would be seeking to answer would be to explore and discover which is the best interface for dealing with date and time, starting with the calendar. A user study was conducted to investigate the mental models of users in a situation like this.
List-View Calendars vs Conventional Grid Calendars
In a related study, researchers argue that an alternative calendar layout, in a form of a list representation of successive days, offers numerous advantages over the conventional calendar layout which mimics the physical calendar. They argue that the list representations provide a more intuitive linear representation of time, and are more flexible for scrolling and zooming (Hund, Dowell, & Mueller, 2014).
An example of a List-View and Grid View Calendar Interface
Experiments were conducted, and the results indicated that calendar search is faster in list view, particularly when searching for dates (Hund et al., 2014). However, one even more important result of the experiment was that searching for days emerged as being faster with the traditional grid calendar layout (Hund et al., 2014).
While the study argues that there is a significant potential for the list view calendar to be better than traditional grid view calendars, from the perspective of designing a dining application, it was imperative to consider the nature of the activity of users when they use the app in the chosen scenario of planning a meetup in the near future.
Explanation of Mental Models
In this user study, we are seeking to analyze the mental models of users when they are in the scenario of having to plan for a meetup with a friend sometime in the near future. We ask the users to rate which of the following aspects of planning a future event is most important to them, which comes to their minds first.
Key Findings of User Study
- “Day of week” emerged as one of the top priorities. Users are likely to appreciate a calendar interface which will allow them to easily find and locate days of the week, as compared to other attributes, such as specific dates in the month.
- “Date” is not one of the top priorities. Users will unlikely require a calendar interface which prioritizes on the find of specific dates, in this scenario.
- “Existing Events” is the top-most important attribute, at 56% selecting first, and a combined First + Second: 84%. One of the top priorities. Therefore, users will likely significantly appreciate a calendar user interface which can pull out the existing events a user has already scheduled in his or her calendar. Also, this feature should be enabled by default.
In the next post, we feature two different calendar interfaces, and users’ feedback about how they feel about the two different interfaces.
User Study Graphs
Interested in viewing the detailed results of the user study? The graphs below indicate the percentage of respondents who rated the four different attributes of planning for an event.
Day of Week
Percentage of respondents indicating the level of importance of “Day of Week”, with “First” being the most important, and “Fourth” being the least important.
Exact Date
Percentage of respondents indicating the level of importance of “Exact Date”, with “First” being the most important, and “Fourth” being the least important.
Existing Events Planned for the Day
Percentage of respondents indicating the level of importance of “Existing Events Planned for the Day”, with “First” being the most important, and “Fourth” being the least important.
Time of Day
Percentage of respondents indicating the level of importance of “Time of Day”, with “First” being the most important, and “Fourth” being the least important.<