IT’S ABOUT TIME
VISUAL, UI, UX DESIGN / CREATIVE & ART DIRECTION
5 people,
4 time zones,
1 app to gather them all.
More people across the globe are working together than ever before. The important question is not where are the people anymore, but rather - when are they?
But, how do you schedule anything when your tomorrow is someone’s today?
When I faced that challenge, I thought it would be cool to design an app that will help people come together at one time that works for everyone, whenever and wherever they are. After all, you don’t want to be the person that schedules calls at 3 am.
And so, Overlapp was born.
No endless emails,
no calendar sharing,
no time zone converters...
It’s about time.
Design a user flow of least resistance and the least number of steps.
This isn’t IKEA, people should be in and out in three minutes or less.
Design a tool that’s great at one thing, not mediocre at 20.
Avoid the tempting nice-to-haves, no one cares.
Home screen is divided in two main sections - Timeline and Time Dial.
I was never really happy with the default scrollable time/date picker. It always seemed like too much work. So, I envisioned Time Dial, a time picker with a dual purpose - to easily set and edit time intervals and to intuitively display all the available times during the 24 hours.
Tap plus to
add time intervals.
Drag ends of
the interval to edit start and
end times, and its duration.
Tap time interval
to set your availability.*
After research into typical scheduling habits and interviews with potential users, I decided that it’s optimal for the Time Dial to work in 15-minute increments. Anything more precise than that complicates things without any added benefit. Anything less detailed adds friction to the scheduling process.
Ergonomically, the haptic precision while interacting with the Time Dial is achieved by monitoring the dragging action by looking at the numerical values of start, end, and duration.
* You can rank your availability based on your preference - not all available times are created equal. Also available later in the day but prefer calls in the morning? Say so.
Timeline view shows everyone’s availability to everyone, in their local times. It overlays their available times with yours and automagically finds and suggests the overlaps. It doesn’t show to anyone why you’re not available during certain times. Your time is your time.
The overlap is a period during which all the group members are available. Aside from full overlaps, the app recognizes and highlights the partial overlaps that include “almost all” (+75%) of the people in the group, in case 100% attendance is not needed. This adds further flexibility to your scheduling.
SPEAK LIKE A HUMAN Because of the global audience, I opted for the terms people intuitively understand - “noon” and “midnight” instead of 12 AM and 12 PM and “yesterday”, “today”, and “tomorrow” instead of dates.
Rotate the phone for the full screen, three day timeline view
Steps in selecting, editing and scheduling overlaps
The calendar view offers the convenience of seeing and editing your appointments (native and imported) in the calendar/daily schedule format.
Since Overlapp is not a calendar app and is designed to work either as a standalone tool or with your existing calendars, only current and the next day are available.
If you set up sync in Settings scheduled overlaps will appear as events on your Apple or Google calendar. Also, your Apple/Google calendar events will populate Overlapp’s calendar view.
And you can integrate with Slack.