Designing A More Intuitive Schedule

The schedule is at the core of the Hour Blocks experience, so it's always being fine-tuned to empower users in planning their day. The Hour Blocks 6.0 release for iOS 14 includes a slew of updates to the schedule, to further reach this goal of user empowerment. This was an incredibly exciting launch, and I'd love to share all the great things that have been worked on as part of it.

A Glanceable Widget

Possibly the biggest feature of Hour Blocks 6.0 is the brand new iOS 14 home screen widget. The vision for this widget was to create a glanceable experience in which a user immediately knows what's next in their schedule, as advised by Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. To achieve this, the widget was modelled after the all-new bright and punchy app icon with a large headline indicating the next scheduled Hour Block.

The widget also works incredibly well in a Smart Stack, only ever making its flamboyant presence known when something is scheduled soon.

An Immersive Date Picker

In iOS 14, Apple introduced a brand new graphical date picker component for developers to be able to use.

This is a great replacement to the current 'not-so-intuitive' card based date picker- something users have greatly appreciated. The new native date picker left a lot of room in the interface, so I decided the best use of this extra space was to provide a preview of the selected date by showing the scheduled Hour Blocks for that day. This saves the user a lot more time, as they won't have to commit to changing the day to see what they have coming up in the future and instead can just keep tapping through different days.

Powerful Rescheduling

For a long time, the ability to reschedule an Hour Block by 'drag and drop' has been a popular request. I was also very much behind this idea, as it would feel like an intuitive action, and the experience would feel incredibly satisfying. However, when I finally tried an implementation of it for this update, I stumbled across a serious UX issue almost immediately. If a block is dragged from early in the day down to later in the day, all blocks earlier in the day would then be shifted an hour behind, and vice versa. This resulted in having to constantly rearrange blocks to fix a now-broken schedule.

A different approach was then taken, where an entirely separate interface would be offered for rescheduling. This interface simply shows all the other blocks in the schedule as 'rescheduling destinations'. This also allows the flexibility of replacing or swapping blocks that are already occupied.

While this solution unfortunately doesn't feel as intuitive or satisfying as 'drag and drop', I believe it is one that best meets this desire for a 'rescheduling' system within the Hour Blocks schedule.

Designing Compact Interfaces

Apple have put a lot of focus around 'Compact Interfaces' in iOS 14, from a compact Siri interface to a compact call banner. Since this release of Hour Blocks has been designed with iOS 14 in mind, this idea of 'Compact Interfaces' had a lot of influence.

Many compact design changes, major and minor, have been made across the board. This includes things like making title headers and blocks more visually compact, allowing the user to see much more of their schedule at once. But the largest example of 'Compact Interfaces' in Hour Blocks 6.0 is the redesigned in-line Sub Blocks.

Prior to this release, Sub Blocks could only be viewed through a separate sheet, accessible in the context menu of an Hour Block. This intermediate step is now out of the equation, compacting Sub Blocks in-line with their corresponding Hour Block.

Much like the widget, the goal here was to create a more glanceable experience for the schedule by embracing iOS 14's focus on 'Compact Interfaces'.

And More…

These updates only skim the surface of everything new in the Hour Blocks 6.0 release. In addition to these updates, the icon picker has been completely redesigned, the To Do List has Siri support, 8 new block icons have been added- and so much more. If you haven't already, you can grab Hour Blocks from the App Store and experience all of these awesome new features: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hour-blocks-day-planner/id1456275153