- I can't do simple things, like quickly adding somebody to an event without clicking the full event view.
- I can't easily create an event spanning over more than a month. Don't bother visualizing it easily.
- Displaying multiple calendars is a mess even with the event merging (45degree stripes turned on) (Event Merge for Google Calendar™)
- I was needed to install "Google Calendar Guests Modify Event Default" (Enables 'Guests can modify event' setting for google calendar by default, when creating a new event.)
- If I create an event I can't simply add myself and accept it
- Event view is boring, lots of things I don't care about. That view looks like a relic from the pre-design era of Google
- Setting up a repeating event is a pain, if I made a mistake god help me. Once I broke something and I had to manually delete two months of repeating events one by one because the repeating nature was somehow gone
- Exceptions are not handled well
- Show me as Available / Busy is dangerous. Should be more hidden, I messed up my coworkers calendar and she got overbooked. I still don't get why would I create an event and mark myself "available". I guess there are use cases, but for me it's pointless
- UI dialogs are inconsistent
There are probably many more, but I felt real pain during these. I even tried Google voice assistant, which was pretty useless for real work.
I then pulled up this video of Apple's vision of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w and cried a little that we are still very far from this. Even calendaring is a pain in the ass.
Thank you for this -- there are a lot of pain points I completely agree with here. Repeating events being one of them.
Events view sucks. I don't think the visual information should be equal if I have a list of things to accomplish in a day that are "time locked" or "time sensitive" or "time orthogonal."
Integrating actual RescueTime data into gcal to provide automation of capturing activity would be an interesting angle if I wanted to hack together a solution for that problem.
RE: Apple -- iCal was honestly the best calendar I've ever used, it was just beautiful. Then I cleaned my soul and installed debian, and haven't looked back.
> Setting up a repeating event is a pain, if I made a mistake god help me. Once I broke something and I had to manually delete two months of repeating events one by one because the repeating nature was somehow gone
I eventually gave up and used Google Apps Script to fing and update events which lost their repeating affinity when I accessed my calendar from multiple clients.
Another one: if you have a shared calendar that you want to invite to a meeting (but you don't own the shared calendar), …? This was for the orgs office hours calendar, where copying the event onto the shared calendar means remembering to update it every time we switched rooms or times (as copies naturally wouldn't update if the source changes).
The Google Product Support pages send a strong, consistent message: "we don't care what you think and we don't fix things we can't see the personal use for ourselves"; hallmarks of deeply user-hostile products.
I might be missing something but it sounds like your workflow is full of edge cases and unusual requirements. There's some valid criticisms in there for sure but I wouldn't expect most products to address many of these.
Don't blame the user for Gcal's inconsistent and hard-to-internalize mental model.
Try not to give reasons to discard someone's feedback, and instead identify the core issues which, if addressed, would benefit multiple users.
It doesn't matter how many people are stymied by poor behaviours, if they are the ones making recommendations to their contacts or businesses on what support could tracts to sign…
Consider that statistically if there's any one person having a problem using software run at that acale, a significant number are likely exist with the same problem without speaking up about it.
That's where the opportunity is.
On a related note keeping the same thing in mind with software that you're building is a very powerful tool: "it works for me/on my machine" is great, but it discounts the possibility that if one user is seeing a bug or usability issur, chances are that that others are too - and not talking about it.
- I can't easily create an event spanning over more than a month. Don't bother visualizing it easily.
- Displaying multiple calendars is a mess even with the event merging (45degree stripes turned on) (Event Merge for Google Calendar™)
- I was needed to install "Google Calendar Guests Modify Event Default" (Enables 'Guests can modify event' setting for google calendar by default, when creating a new event.)
- If I create an event I can't simply add myself and accept it
- Event view is boring, lots of things I don't care about. That view looks like a relic from the pre-design era of Google
- Setting up a repeating event is a pain, if I made a mistake god help me. Once I broke something and I had to manually delete two months of repeating events one by one because the repeating nature was somehow gone
- Exceptions are not handled well
- Show me as Available / Busy is dangerous. Should be more hidden, I messed up my coworkers calendar and she got overbooked. I still don't get why would I create an event and mark myself "available". I guess there are use cases, but for me it's pointless
- UI dialogs are inconsistent
There are probably many more, but I felt real pain during these. I even tried Google voice assistant, which was pretty useless for real work.
I then pulled up this video of Apple's vision of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w and cried a little that we are still very far from this. Even calendaring is a pain in the ass.