Spatch / 2014–15

The calendar an email startup was missing, and the piece its fundraising needed most.

My part: First employee and product designer, reporting to the CEO: the design strategy, the calendar from scratch, then the desktop web app. I also hired the first engineers.
What shipped: The mobile calendar. Investors called the mobile app a killer app, and Spatch raised $3.2M, a record seed round for Europe at the time.

Spatch, as it was presented at the time.

I wrote the design strategy before the screens, with three principles: powerful but not a monster, the user’s goal is king, and the user interface as unison. The deck it went into, with the latest design, reassured investors that the startup could execute its vision.

Three dark slides: Powerful but not a Monster, User’s Goal is King, User Interface as Unison — The three principles, from the investor deck.

Scheduling should happen inside the calendar: picking a time, or between proposed times, makes no sense without your schedule in front of you, and none of the popular calendar apps did it that way. I tried it in an Adobe Flash prototype, and used that for guerrilla user testing before anything was built.

Pencil sketch on grid paper of three calendar layouts: list, grid and full year — List, grid, full year: layouts people already knew.

Three phone screens of a week view: the calendar, a new event being placed over it, and two proposed slots marked 1 and 2 — The sender: the week, a new event, two proposed slots.

A week view with a proposed meeting slot highlighted over the recipient’s existing events — The recipient: the proposed slot over their own week.