Let’s kick things off and start talking about one of the most interesting aspects of Presdo.

A lot of people ask: why did we choose to have only a text field on the home page and nothing else? For a web app that deals with dates and times, why isn’t there a calendar picker anywhere in Presdo’s user interface?

We went a different way with good reason, and here’s why: when people want to organize a get together, they often don’t have all the details about when, where, who, and so on, of the event. In fact, it’s a collaborative activity. People might have a set of dates and times they’d be willing to get together, but very often, they might just know a time of day they’d like to meet someone. Or, they know which day they’d like to meet but they are flexible about the time.

By using the text-based interface, Presdo lets people say as much–or as little–about the event as they want when creating events. We wanted to use this kind of ambiguity to enable a group of people to work out the best times.

Here are some examples:

• You can enter Monday with Phil into the home page, and Presdo assumes you want to meet Phil anytime on Monday. It will let him find a good time to meet you by suggesting other times on Monday in case Phil can’t make your “best time”.

• If you enter afternoon with Phil, Presdo assumes you’d like to meet Phil anytime in the afternoon over the next few days. You and Phil can work out the details about which day will be good for both of you.

• You can also offer a choice of times to people. For example, you can enter Monday 2pm, Tuesday 2pm, or Fri 2pm. That’s a lot to type, isn’t it? So, just type mon, tue or fri at 2:30pm.

• Presdo also understands a few convenient words like lunch, breakfast, and dinner to make it very easy to plan these kinds of events. If you type in lunch with Phil, Presdo assumes you’d like to plan a lunch with Phil over the next few days.

Several calendar programs also have text-based inputs. Most famously, Google Calendar has a “Quick Add” feature that lets you create appointments. Don’t be fooled!

Presdo is much more than that because you don’t have to be specific about the time. It uses this ambiguity to guide suggestions for you and your guests to fine tune the details.

So we hope you’ll try being ambiguous with your friends!

–Eric

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.