1844408 - Provide better intervals for calendar event listing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Calendar Frontend, enhancement)

Description

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

The existing infinite intervals "All Events" and "All Future Events" will be replaced by "Next 6 months" and "Next 12 months".

The existing implementation of "All Events" and "All Future Events" provides undesirable/unexpected UX, displaying only a single occurrence of recurring events. Displaying more than one occurrence presents its own UX challenges, as recurring events can have infinite occurrences. Proposed means of addressing this include placing a cap on the duration of "all" or a finite cap on the number of occurrences shown, but both of these would be surprising given the wording.

In addition to the above issues, it's unclear that these intervals provide good value to users. The most likely scenario is that users have to scroll through a very long list of events to find what they are looking for. There is also no interval currently between "31 days" and "forever". As such, the intervals which do not behave as expected or provide apparent user value should be replaced by longer finite intervals.

Comment 1

[Dave Labrecque]

I would only add a suggestion that may make the search for recurring events through "All Events" functional as one would expect: keep interface as is, but reveal the search hits in sets of x (or make x user-definable), with a link to "show next x events" at the bottom of the listing. Clicking on that button would continue the search until the next x events are found and listed. And so on.

Maybe you'd have to trap for there being no more such events beyond a certain point in time. So be it. But I'd think a smart subroutine could look at the recurring event details to know when the end to the event series might be.

I'm not a code guy, so there may be stuff I'm missing, here. Doesn't seem like it, though.

Comment 2

[Ian Goodacre]

I wish "All Future Events" would stay but fixed so that for recurring events it shows all with an end date in the future and all with no end date, but only shows these once, rather than once for each future recurrence. This way I could find all the events that will appear in my calendar on some future date without the performance penalty of generating long or infinite series of recurrences. If I want to know the details of one of these recurring events, I can open it and look at the recurrence rules.

The problem with the current implementation is that I can't find them, except by looking through ALL events. I don't want to delete past events but I don't want to look through hundreds of them to find those few that have an occurrence or recurrence in the future.

Providing searches for all recurrences with broader date range (i.e. 6 or 12 months) is an improvement or current options but doesn't solve the general problem of finding all events with an occurrence or recurrence in the future.

Comment 3

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Infinite future is a feature that's pretty rare in calendar apps(Google calendar doesn't support it, for example, it stops working after a certain event count).

In any case this is a stopgap solution. The UI for this needs a redesign, a drop down doesn't make any sense as a time range selector in the first place. Let alone the rest of the mess.

Comment 4

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

(In reply to Ian Goodacre from comment #2)

recurring events it shows all with an end date in the future and all with no end date, but only shows these once

I'm not sure this is an intuitive behavior either; what if I'm trying to tell at a glance which weeks I have a particular meeting? Does this only apply to "All Future Events" or to all intervals? As Andrei mentioned, we'd like to improve this down the road to allow more user control, at minimum by allowing users to specify a range of dates.

Comment 5

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

Attachment: Bug 1844408 - Move unifinder strings from DTD to Fluent. r=rjl

Comment 6

[Ian Goodacre]

(In reply to Sean Burke [:leftmostcat] from comment #4)

(In reply to Ian Goodacre from comment #2)

recurring events it shows all with an end date in the future and all with no end date, but only shows these once

I'm not sure this is an intuitive behavior either; what if I'm trying to tell at a glance which weeks I have a particular meeting? Does this only apply to "All Future Events" or to all intervals?

I was only thinking of All Future Events and mostly concerned with the list of events, not the calendar view.

Even if the period selector is All Future Events, the calendar view shows no more than one month of events at a time and this relatively small finite set of events could be generated as the calendar view period is changed: there is no need to produce a list of all future events for a recurring event with no termination (i.e. an infinite list).

I suppose not very intuitive but moreso than seeing almost nothing in All Future Events events list. Maybe I'm odd but I have mostly long standing recurring events in my calendar. When I looked recently, needing to find and adjust one in particular, I expected to see many events. Instead, there were only two non-recurring events in the list. All the recurring events had start dates months to years in the past, so they didn't appear. Finding them in All Events isn't practical because there are hundreds of events to scroll through there.

Comment 7

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

(In reply to Ian Goodacre from comment #6)

When I looked recently, needing to find and adjust one in particular, I expected to see many events. Instead, there were only two non-recurring events in the list. All the recurring events had start dates months to years in the past, so they didn't appear. Finding them in All Events isn't practical because there are hundreds of events to scroll through there.

The failure to meet expectations here is the primary motivation for this change, as I don't believe we have a way to implement "All Future Events" that isn't in some way surprising. Can you help me better understand how you use it? In the case you mention where you were looking for a particular event, would it have been sufficient to be able to enter a part of the name and have the results not be restricted by date?

Comment 8

[Ian Goodacre]

(In reply to Sean Burke [:leftmostcat] from comment #7)

Can you help me better understand how you use it? In the case you mention where you were looking for a particular event, would it have been sufficient to be able to enter a part of the name and have the results not be restricted by date?

Apologies, this is long. I hope it is somewhat clear despite different terminology, expectations and perspectives. I find it difficult to express myself clearly and succinctly.

I usually use the 'week view' period of the calendar. For checking what events I have today and planning my week, this works well. I usually ignore the period drop-down and event list.

Recently, I missed an annual renewal date. I wasn't sure if I had failed to schedule it or had scheduled it incorrectly, so I wanted to find what events I had scheduled.

I first tried 'All Future Events' and was surprised that the event list showed only two events, both of which were non-recurring events in the far future. I have many weekly, monthly and annually recurring events with no end date. To my mind, these are future events, despite them having been initially scheduled in the past. The results surprised me and I tried all the selections in the period drop-down.

If I knew when it was scheduled, I would have simply found the event in the calendar view, but either there was no event or it was scheduled incorrectly: it could have been any date - I didn't know when to look. I could have scrolled through an entire year, but that's a bit tedious.

The period drop-down selection All Events appears to list all events but that gave me a very long list of mostly past events. It was overwhelming and I didn't have time to inspect them all.

It would have helped if I could easily distinguish between events for which all occurrences were in the past and those for which at least one occurrence was in the future, but there is no indication of this in the event list itself. The hover pop-up doesn't show if there is a recurrence schedule, only start and end times of the initial occurrence, which are long in the past for my long standing recurring events. When the events are opened the recurrence schedule is shown but it is very time consuming to open each event in the list, one at a time. I wanted something more convenient. If the hover pop-up showed the same as opening the event, that would have helped, but not as much as a filtered list that excluded events entirely in the past.

"All Future Events" is indeed ambiguous and different people might expect different things but it seemed to me to be exactly what I wanted. My expectation was that it would show me all events that would appear in my calendar at some time in the future. I expected this would include those with a start date in the future and those with recurrence and recurrence end date in the future, or no end to the recurrence. But, of course, that is not what I found.

I was confused. I didn't understand why it was only showing me two events when I have many more future events in my calendar view.

I searched to learn how it works and soon found several older bug reports, going back years with no changes made, and finally this one.

I confused in my mind the event list and the calendar view. I realize now there are two period selectors and these two views (event list and calendar view) are independent of each other.

Now I realize that for a finite period the event list includes every occurrence and/or recurrence of an event in the event that is within the selected period. That makes sense. There are two infinite periods: All Events and All Future Events. These, somewhat necessarily, show the events differently. If they showed all occurrences the list might be infinitely long. All Events shows each event once, regardless of recurrence. This makes sense to me. My preference and expectation for All Future Events is that it do similar: show the subset of All Events that excludes the events for which all occurrences and/or recurrences are in the past. That is, all for which at least one occurrence is in the future. But show each such event only once, as in All Events.

In the circumstances that lead me here, a filter on name would not have helped because I didn't recall if or exactly what I had entered. I wouldn't have known what to search for. I might have guessed but if I didn't find what I was expecting I wouldn't have known if it was because I had not scheduled anything or I had guessed the name incorrectly. I really did want a list of 'All Future Events' to look through but not 'All Future Event Recurrences'. Rather, the events as single items that might have a recurrence schedule or not.

In my thinking, the events are the editable items. Each event may occur once or several times or an infinite number of times, depending on the recurrence (I guess I should say 'repeat') schedule. I don't know what terminology you would use to distinguish between the editable item and an occurrence in the timeline. I think of these as 'event' and 'occurrence' respectively.

If I open a recurring event from the event list, there is only one choice to edit it: edit the entire series as a single item with a repeat specification. But if I open one of the recurrences from the calendar view, there are two choices: only this occurrence; or all occurrences. But either way, a single window is opened. When editing 'only this occurrence' is it this occurrence of a singular event (this is how I think of it), or a single occurrence of a set of events? Is there a good term for the collection of occurrences that can be edited in a single window by choosing 'all occurrences'? I haven't thought about it much and I know nothing of the underlying data structures. No doubt there are complications there.

If I wanted to see all the occurrences, I would use the calendar view. I now see how the event list works for finite periods and I could use it, but I never did. The calendar view works fine if I want to know what's coming today, this week or this month.

Anyway, thank you for your attention. Any improvement would be welcome, including simply adding the longer periods for the event list initially proposed here. And the 'All Future Events' option does nothing for me as currently implemented. I won't miss the current function.

Comment 9

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

Attachment: Bug 1844408 - Replace infinite intervals with 6 and 12 months out. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

Depends on D184435

Comment 10

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

Attachment: dropdown-ordering.png

Would love a quick check that this seems like the appropriate ordering; wasn't sure about putting "this calendar month" after the months-long intervals, but also wasn't sure about putting it in between "next x" and "next y".

Comment 11

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Comment on attachment 9346729 [details]
dropdown-ordering.png

yeah, I think this is good and it makes sense.
Thanks

Comment 12

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/becde60b9631
Move unifinder strings from DTD to Fluent. r=rjl
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/e3c2bc4f9130
Replace infinite intervals with 6 and 12 months out. r=mkmelin

Comment 13

[Sean Burke [:leftmostcat]]

Due to the need for string changes due to fluent migration, this patch is not suitable for uplift.