Palendar helps users prioritise and plan their time more effectively with multiple joint calendars, simplifying event organisation and scheduling.
Role UX/UI Designer
Context
In a world where busyness is increasingly normalised, individuals struggle to balance their personal and professional lives. Packed schedules often lead to difficulties in managing events, resulting in frequent double bookings.
Research confirmed that users found it challenging to keep track of events and often scheduled overlapping commitments.
Additionally, there were no effective, easy-to-use joint calendar apps readily accessible on mobile devices.
Calendar View
New Event View
Solution
Meet Palendar
Palendar was created to be a joint calendar/ scheduling app that helped users line up their schedules with each other.
User Pain Points
Time management
Busy people struggle with effectively managing and prioritising events resulting in stress and a poor work/life balance
Coordination
Trying to coordinate their schedule with family and friends is difficult, often resulting in miscommunication and scheduling conflicts.
Personal schedule
Without a comprehensive overview of their schedule, users find it challenging to make informed decisions about how to allocation time/prioritise events.
Managing calendars
Managing multiple calendars for different aspects of the user's life can be difficult to maange and often leads to double booking and missed events.
User Journey
The Primary User
Goals & Frustrations
Planning
User feedback showed that people appreciated having the calendar and appointments visible on the homepage, and found the event search bar useful.
However, many felt the layout was too complicated – especially the top navigation (appointments, calendars, invites) – and wanted more customisation, like the ability to pin key appointments or invites.
Planning
The early design offered some customisation, but after usability testing, I redesigned the layout to be more intuitive and user-friendly.
In the second round of testing, users shared that the calendar felt cluttered and overwhelming – mainly due to tight spacing around the dates. To fix this, I adjusted the padding and used a calendar UI kit to create a cleaner, more consistent look.
Before Usability Study
After Usability Study
Learnings
Designing the Palendar app from 0 to 1 at such an early stage in my career taught me the value of conducting multiple usability studies throughout the design process. These studies were instrumental in shaping the app to be more user-friendly. Feedback from users shaped each iteration, revealing how my own biases had, at times, subtly influenced the design - be it from a false concept I initially had of the typical user flow, to the general layout of the app.
This experience helped me to recognise the danger of assuming my perspective as representative of the entire user base, and it instilled in me the importance of designing with a broader, more inclusive mindset.