Designing a closer look at your day

We like to sweat the details of every screen in Carom, especially the ones that communicate the most critical information. That means we ask a lot of questions, reject a lot of ideas, and refine a lot of concepts. Here are some of the decisions that led to the feature you'll see in Carom today.

First, a quick look at the day view in our Carom demo account:

It’s one small part of the app, but we’re proud of it. Some careful choices that might not be obvious:

• We show enough of your day that you can get a clear picture of what’s coming up, while still making sure each event is big enough to read at least a good chunk of the title.
• You’re centered on the current time, if you’re viewing today. But you can always see “n more” before and after the range you’re viewing to make sure you don’t miss meetings a few hours out.
• When you view another day, if your meetings are clustered around the same few hours, your view centers on them. You’ll see in our video that we center on content, not an arbitrary time.
• You can view multiple calendars. Sharing data across an organization is central to what Carom does, and the day view is no exception.
• For most people, most work happens between 7am and 7pm. We don’t give as much visual weight to the time before and after 7, so you’ll see narrower bands in your calendar outside working hours—unless you have a meeting scheduled, in which case they maintain their width.

And critically, unlike a typical week view in Outlook or other calendars, which doesn’t translate to mobile, the horizontal day view works great on your phone as well:

Of course, the best way to appreciate software is to use it. No need to connect your own calendar—you can create a demo account to try the calendar yourself.