Cafe - Calendar For Everything (WIP)
Web & App Design
2025
Lead Designer
Personal Project
UI/UX Design
Discover Calendars
Explore and subscribe to public or shared calendars for events near you.
Add or Import Events
Sync or import events from friends and family
Personalize Your Calendar
Personalize events with categories, icons, and colors that fit your schedule.
Edit Events
Quickly add and manage events
Project info
Scope
The goal of this project was to design a dead-simple calendar experience that prioritizes usability over feature overload. Rather than competing with enterprise calendar platforms, the focus was on creating an interface that makes viewing, sharing, and understanding schedules effortless especially for families, small groups, and public-facing use cases.
Process
I reviewed existing calendar tools to understand where complexity and confusion occur, then focused on simplifying the experience through clear hierarchy and minimal interface elements. The design was refined through iterative layout and visual decisions to ensure the calendar could be understood and used without explanation.
Solution
The final solution is a minimal, modern calendar interface that makes it easy to see what matters at a glance. Events are visually organized, color-coded for clarity, and designed to scale across different contexts from personal schedules to shared or public calendars.
PROBLEM
Calendars work well alone, but break down when plans involve other people
Modern calendar apps are effective at showing personal events, but they become difficult to manage once users need to interact with shared schedules, discover new calendars, or reuse existing plans. Browsing events, coordinating with others, or pulling in outside schedules often requires switching tools or manually recreating information, adding friction to something meant to feel simple.
OPPORTUNITY
Calendars don’t need fewer features, they need better structure
Rather than stripping calendars down further, there’s an opportunity to rethink how complexity is organized. If discovery, sharing, and filtering are designed intentionally, a calendar can support richer use cases without overwhelming the user or cluttering their primary schedule.
DESIGN INTENT
A simple interface that supports more flexible calendar behaviors
CAFÉ explores how a clean, minimal UI can still support advanced actions like browsing public calendars, saving schedules for later, filtering visibility, and sharing events. The goal isn’t to compete on simplicity alone, but to make powerful calendar behaviors feel obvious and approachable.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
Understanding how people discover, reuse, and manage schedules
I reviewed existing calendar tools and observed how users currently find events, share schedules, and manage multiple calendars at once. Research showed that people often rely on external links, messages, or screenshots to coordinate plans, rather than using the calendar itself as a shared space.
INSIGHT
People want to explore and reference calendars before fully committing to them
People frequently want to browse calendars, temporarily view schedules, or save them for later without immediately adding everything to their main calendar. The lack of lightweight ways to preview, filter, or hide calendars leads to clutter and hesitation around sharing.
PRODUCT DIRECTION
Treat calendars as discoverable, filterable collections not just fixed views
CAFÉ reframes calendars as flexible layers that users can turn on, hide, save, or share depending on context. This allows users to explore events and schedules without permanently altering their primary calendar or losing clarity.
CORE FEATURES
Supporting discovery, control, and collaboration without added complexity
CAFÉ introduces features that let users browse public or shared calendars, save calendars to revisit later, and pull individual events or entire schedules into their own view. Users can filter calendars on and off, hide specific schedules, create multiple calendars for different needs, and share selectively, all while keeping the interface readable and calm.
SOLUTION
A minimal calendar interface built for sharing, filtering, and reuse
The current design focuses on clarity first, using familiar calendar patterns and a simple visual hierarchy so users can easily track events, tasks, and schedules. Beyond basic planning, CAFÉ supports discovering calendars, saving schedules for later, filtering visibility, and sharing events without overwhelming the main calendar view. The goal is to keep everyday planning simple while making more advanced calendar behaviors feel natural and easy to use.
CURRENT STATE
An evolving concept exploring direction and identity
The screens shown represent an early visual and structural direction for CAFÉ. While they demonstrate how key interactions and features could work, the system is not yet fully defined. The product is currently being workshopped to refine its positioning and clarify what makes it distinct within the calendar space.