Interface Design: Details Make a Difference

May 7th, 2009 by Frank Piacitelli

Martino Flynn’s Digital Media Services team manages a lot of projects at once. To stay on top of things and keep each other in the loop, we use a shared Google spreadsheet—a great tool that Google created and lets the world use for free. In general, it’s an excellent tool, but there’s a detail in the interface that’s been slowing me down. I couldn’t find an easy way to report it to Google, so here we are.

For managing projects, I generally follow David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method, which focuses on the “next action” to keep projects moving. So, I am constantly inputting and modifying dates on our spreadsheet. Take a look at the familiar date-picking helper popup shown here — this is a screengrab from our Google spreadsheet. In the calendar itself, they’ve darkened the leftmost and rightmost columns, making the calendar visually appear to display weeks from Sunday to Saturday, with the 5-day work week in the middle. However, it really lists dates from Monday to Sunday. Now, I’ve heard that some European calendars use the Monday-to-Sunday approach, but I still think you’d want the work week highlighted instead of Tuesday through Saturday.

My point: this was likely a small oversight by the design and development team for this application, but it’s not insignificant. I use the application a lot and I have to twist my brain to the calendar’s appearance each time. I tried to report this to Google, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do it. So if you’re listening, Google, please remedy this small but important interface design detail, it would greatly improve the experience that I (and I imagine many others) are having with your application.

— Frank Piacitelli

This entry was posted by Frank Piacitelli on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 and is filed under Design, Development, Google, Interactive, Interface Design, Technology, User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.