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| AOL Calendar (client/web) 7.0,8.0,9.0 |
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Objective:
Launch the first calendar service to over 50 million people on the AOL client , Web, Netscape Network, and Compuserve services. |
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Challenges:
The calendar team consisted of 2 product managers, one for internationalization, and one for local products. 7 developers, 1 UI designer, 1 visual designer , 1 business owner, and 7 QA. Coordinating all communication and design throughout all groups located in various parts of the country and overseas was quite challenging. |
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Summary and notes:
AOL Calendars were designed to enhance AOL members experience through sharing and laying the groundwork to thread date and time in AOL app's. We introduced event level sharing, tell a friend emails, a publish and subscribe model, calendar overlays and integration of alerts. As a result we have reevaluated both the approach and the feature set to be implemented. Members will be able to share individual events and have read / write access to others calendars. The first online calendar application was built by WHEN. COM. A startup that I worked at and was eventually bought within 7 months by AOL Time Warner. Microsoft bought Jump.com, and the rest was history. AOL can be given the credit for the first company to launch a calendar online to the masses. |
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The main screen
in AOL Calendar
consisted of three
main interaction
panes. The sharing
pane, the event
directory pane, and
the month/week/
day pane. Core interactions were
adding events, tasks
and syncing to
devices.
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This small section
of specifications
shows the detail and
deliverables we
would hand off to
development for
coding purposes. All
screens would have
block flows, and
additional call outs
like the drag-and-
drop section you see
above for detail.
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The UI here called
out the various
functions for the
calendar and shared
events list. You can
see that there are
notes for both the
web and client
versions of the calendar and not
to forget accessibility
issues that need to
be accounted for. |
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The week view in
the calendar posed
various problems to
solve. One would be
the layout of
appointments that
overlapped or were
close to each other
in the cells. The user
needed to be able to
click and drag an
area to span times
and cells in order to
add an appointment.
We found that
clicking directly in a
cell was the best way
to enter data.
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The add event
dialog had various
UI elements and
challenges. The
ability to enter
reminders and to
create repeating
events,sharing, and
conflicting
appointments. The
user can enter data
and the "conflicting
events" field would
automatically
populate to show if
there were any
items of concern.
user enters the date
and time fields. |
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While working on the
calendar product, this
meant that we had
to create various
modules that would
use the calendar
backend data and
interface with other
products in AOL. This
widget was created
for the MY AOL
startpage. The widget
had the ability to
drag and drop to be
replaced around the
page.
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2007 - Rob Metzgar Design - All work launched and usable |
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