Availability calendar: seeing what runs tomorrow
I redesigned the availability calendar in TicketingHub's dashboard and built it with Claude.
Every tour, attraction and activity business on TicketingHub has one. TicketingHub calls them suppliers. They open it to see what runs tomorrow, to close a day, or to check where a group of twelve could still go.
Who uses it
Before changing anything, I counted who actually uses the page.
The same page has to work for a guide with one tour a day and for a company with hundreds of products.
I picked fifty supplier accounts, each a different kind of business, and checked every change against them.
One card per time
The old calendar put each product in a block and piled its times inside it. I took it apart, so every time is a card of its own.
Time order
Cards let a day read top to bottom like a schedule. Two o'clock is where two o'clock is, whatever the product.
Fullness as a bar
The old calendar gave a whole block one shade, from blue to red as it filled. A bar along the bottom of the card now says how full each time is.
Red reads as a warning, but a full time is good news. And a full block and an overbooked one came out the same red, so the one real problem looked like every sold-out tour. Now red means overbooked and nothing else.
A colour per product
With fullness in the bar, the card's fill was free. A product can now have one of twelve colours.
Every colour comes from one value, mixed into the white. I tuned orange, pink and yellow until none could be mistaken for the overbooked red.
A new product starts on the first colour no other product uses, so a supplier rarely has to pick one.
Names, not initials
The old calendar named a product by its initials.
The card gives the name a line of its own, the product's short name or its full name when it has none. That also fixed products with non-Latin names, whose initials had come out empty.
States without colour
A sold-out time gets a border in its own colour. An overbooked one turns red whatever the product, with a darker border. A closed time is dashed, with the ban icon, and any guests it still has show beside its marks as a person and their number.
Three views for three shapes
Timeline puts the times of day down the side, for a venue that runs many times a day. I had dropped a table like this early on, because it fell apart when two products shared an hour. With cards, they're two cards in one cell.
Grid puts the products down the side, with each product's guests for the week, for a supplier with a handful of them.
Where it stands
Month, Timeline and Grid are live, in every language the dashboard supports, with a help article to go with them. At its largest, the calendar now draws in half the time.
The research points further, to making bookings the content of the month: the times that have guests or need attention, with the rest of the schedule as one quiet line per day.