GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 768618
(Month view) date numbers need to be at the top of the cell, not at the bottom
Last modified: 2017-11-16 11:55:07 UTC
I get regularly confused and enter events in the wrong week because the current month view shows date numbers at the bottom of cells instead of the top of the cells. Besides the fact that the current layout contradicts every traditional calendar month view in existence (see https://www.google.ca/search?tbm=isch&q=calendar+month&tbs=imgo:1 ;) this is not just a matter of habit... there are usability reasons why calendar dates are supposed to be at the top of the cells: - When scanning data, we are used to "headers" being above contents - Our eyes gravitate towards visual clusters and create psychovisual groupings of information; hence, a date is associated with whatever group of exents (within the cell) are closest to it.
Created attachment 332394 [details] [review] month-view: move day numbers to the top The current layout does not conform with traditional calendars, that is, the day numbers are rendered at the bottom. This commit moves the day numbers to the top. However, with the changes, the events appear below the day numbers, thus leaving space for one less event.
Created attachment 332395 [details] Screenshot of the changes This also takes care of the overlap issue with the “other events” item.
Any chance this could get looked at before the freeze?
Sorry for the delay! I'm not particularly into moving the day number back to the top of the cell. We already have way too little space to work with, and loosing a padding both on top and bottom looks like a waste of space. I'm putting the designers in CC to see how we can work around this issue.
If you're terribly concerned about the space usage, you could make the date number an overlaid thing with some horizontal spacing/fading of the contents of the first line or something... Generally though, whitespace is a feature, it helps the eye discriminate the contents instead of having every row snuck together with contents pack'd like sardines (I wouldn't be surprised if the other designers think the same) For what it's worth, a much bigger space availability issue than this (and low-hanging fruit, from a design perspective) is that with "Month view" currently you're showing as many as 6 week rows in the limited vertical space of a widescreen display... this sort of view never worked for me and my bazillion appointments, hence why I consider "upcoming weeks" view (bug #700662) so important for my personal usecase. That's where the real space savings (and clarity gains) are.
Having tested out GNOME Calendar on and off since then, I really can't get used to this. Headers-below-contents just doesn't work. I keep filing events in the wrong week all the time because of this.
This is related to a report I opened in issue #758679. Jean-François, Maybe it would be okay if the cell borders were darker still?
Nah, darker lines wouldn't solve the issue. 1) Headers go on top. Headers at the bottom is backwards compared to every single western calendar I've seen out there, in real life and in software. 2) If you're trying to fill every bit of space completely, you have no whitespace between rows, and it remains a visual mess even if you darken the cell borders. If anyone is concerned about space, the real fundamental fix is to implement bug #700662. I swear, once you have that feature, you'll never run out of vertical space, even with an insane amount of daily appointments like I do*, because you're no longer trying to get GNOME Calendar trying to force 6 weeks/rows into the screen like it does now, including two empty half-rows (which is silly). By having the ability to show only the 3-4 "upcoming weeks" you save 33-50% of the screen height and thus have plenty of breathing room to have things be actually readable. *: an example of my scheduling: http://fortintam.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015-03-cal-blurred.jpg
Jean-Francois, frankly speaking I've seen several real life calendars with the numbers not at the top of the cell. Also the proximity principle you cite some comments above doesn't speak about the positioning of things, just, well, thier proximity :). As stated the day number position is for space saving, which is pretty important in this case, implementing other views won't help with that. I'll thinker about possible solutions.
> the proximity principle you cite some comments above > doesn't speak about the positioning of things, > just, well, their proximity :) Not sure what you mean about "positioning" (left vs right?) but I do believe that proximity is important indeed. If the date is at the top, it is always visually clustered near the contents (events) and thus really acts as an anchoring header in a consistent place. If it's at the bottom, the amount of whitespace between the events and the date varies (unless every day is filled to the brim) and thus it doesn't work well. I forgot to mention another reason why I think darkening the cell border lines wouldn't work: because they're already right next to the event widgets at the top. Event widgets have about 1-2 pixels spacing from the border, so the border gets blended with them, my eyes will not differentiate that even if make the border pure #000000, it would only look visually busier. And I say that the dates are meant to act as visual "anchoring headers" because whenever someone is in my office saying, "let's do XYZ on the 17th at 10" and I have 2 seconds to decide, my eyes go hunting for the date number* and then look immediately below/next to them to see how busy or free the cell is. *: especially since I can't trust the cell positions for quick recognition because of bug #746266 and bug #771733 - as you can see it all ties in together ;)
Review of attachment 332394 [details] [review]: Reviewed. Needs further discussion still.
*** Bug 764709 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I can only agree with the commenters which want the date at the top. It is this usability shortcoming which keeps me from using Gnome Calendar. If only California was still being developed :-( The space argument is in my honest opinion a farce and a bit typical of many Gnome development decisions. I value its simplicity but not at the cost of basic usability. The same counts for Nautilus and its lack of a two pane view option. Nautilus is luckily improving now, but still not on par with Nemo. If only things were optional or extensible. For the moment I will stick to Thunderbird with Lightning or Fantastical on my MacBook Pro.I do not have much hope that this bug will be fixed though. Keep up the good work, but do not make bad basic usability design decisions. There is a reason why many/most great calendar applications (Fantastical) do it differently! Kind regards, Josquin.
(In reply to Josquin Hoens from comment #14) > I can only agree with the commenters which want the date at the top. It is > this usability shortcoming which keeps me from using Gnome Calendar. If only > California was still being developed :-( > > The space argument is in my honest opinion a farce and a bit typical of many > Gnome development decisions. I value its simplicity but not at the cost of > basic usability. The same counts for Nautilus and its lack of a two pane > view option. Nautilus is luckily improving now, but still not on par with > Nemo. If only things were optional or extensible. > > For the moment I will stick to Thunderbird with Lightning or Fantastical on > my MacBook Pro.I do not have much hope that this bug will be fixed though. > > Keep up the good work, but do not make bad basic usability design decisions. > There is a reason why many/most great calendar applications (Fantastical) do > it differently! > > Kind regards, > Josquin. First, Bugzilla is a place for technical discussion. Your comment does not add to the technical nor design discussion. Please refrain from writing these comments on Bugzilla. Second, this was really mean from you, dude. There were practical reasons to keep it that way, and no practical reasons to change it. None of the reasoning given above could make Month view fit 4 events in each cell on a 1366x768 screen, and until very recently, nobody stepped up to design a way to fix that. Thanks to Allan Day's work (and very much not thanks to your passive-aggressive comment) at bug 789855, this is fixed now in git master and will be available from 3.27.2 and beyond. Closing as FIXED.
Although this "feature bug" bug is closed I still want to post a reaction to the above comments of Georges: Firstly, calling someone "dude" who you do not know is a show of contempt and disrespect. Do not get too personal :-) Secondly, there is nothing mean to my comment or complaint as well. I understand it is not nice to hear as a software developer that several users find your software product not usable because of a fundamentally bad design decision. I used the promising California calendar application before Gnome Calendar was kind of forced upon me. It also has its problems, but at least you can directly see in the month view on which date you have an appointment. Looking at a calendar and getting attracted to the wrong date defeats its sole purpose, in my opinion (and apparently others who rightfully raised this "bug" report). Google Calendar, Fantastical, Google and heck even Microsoft do the same! In California the space problem was solved quite gracefully. The font size could be adjusted and is stored in the user settings. I have never had any problems with it on small laptop screens or for that matter increasingly common big high-dpi monitors. I apologize for apparently hitting the "Enter" button twice, which was not intended. I really felt to add a comment however, because I saw it was not taken seriously. I appreciate the hard work and REALLY would like to use Gnome Calendar as my daily driver. I highly value the minimalist design approach of Gnome (and e.g. Apple and Google) where less is often more. You do not need five ways to find or do a setting (Microsoft!). I am not a developer myself, but I track the development of Gnome and its core applications continuously. I see progress is made and it is fascinating to see the improvements in desktop Linux which result of the effort of dedicated people like you! Finally I am glad to see the issue is being worked on. If it technically can be resolved a lot of people will become happy users of Gnome Calendar. Kind regards from the Netherlands, Josquin.