Why don’t online calendars work?
I wrote previously about Lloyd and Joel’s complaints about online calendars. In the Guardian’s Business Sense today, Neil writes about online collaboration tools, and while he has many positive things to say about general collaboration tools he still can’t get the hang of online calendars either:
Calendars have a bit to go to match the slickness of the other applications featured here, perhaps reflecting the complexity of the jobs we expect them to fulfill.
Now that’s a funny thing, don’t you think? Managing a project, he says, is a great convenience with Basecamp, and writing a document collaboratively is great with Writely, but something as basic as keeping a diary just doesn’t work well enough.
Neil says “they are struggling to be as convenient as their desktop counterparts”. Why is that?
I think there are two issues working together here. The first is that using a diary is a very natural thing for us to do — flicking to a date, jotting something down, glancing at once at a week or a day, and so on. But following on from that is the second issue: a web browser is fundamentally not designed to run arbitrary applications. It’s not easy to pick up keystrokes and mouse gestures. It’s possible, certainly, but the ubiquitous browser language of Javascript just doesn’t make it that easy, and when filtered through the web browser itself there’s an element of uncertainty that complicates things even further.
This is important in a calendar application because keeping a diary should flow naturally, without us having to think. It’s different for a project planner because project planning is difficult, and it’s different for a writing tool, because the core part of writing doesn’t involve too much more than using the keyboard.
I’m not sure this need be the case. It all seems to be because the calendar developers all insist on using Javascript (aka AJAX). Indeed, one of Planzo’s boasts is “Latest Technology: AJAX, RSS, Web 2.0, XML, SMS”). AJAX in that list is only to boast about how clever and cool they are. It’s not relevant to the user. (Imagine “Microsoft Office 2007: written in C#”.) A calendar would be much more reliable if they tried to break out of the browser and used something browser-agnostic such as Flash or Java. But while the producers of these things continue to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon singing the AJAX anthem — instead of thinking more about the people who use them — they’ll always find it very hard to get the right user experience.
