best way to depict up to 17 different entities in a calendar (week view)

Question

I'm developing a week view of a calendar for scheduling 17 different venues (river boats as well as physical locations like banquet halls) for a client who specializes in providing venues for weddings, corporate events, etc.

Below is a rough prototype of the week view. I'm concerned about having 17 different colors representing each venue in the calendar. At first I thought having a color assigned to each venue would be an appropriate way to visually show how much an entity is used in a week. Will having up to 17 different colors be too loud? Is there a better way to depict visually how much a venue is used within a given week?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

looks like the solution would be to use filters on this kind of view. And it might be worth trying to group these entities into higher orders.

The 17 colours isn't going to work as one colour isn't going to be distinct enough to another entity.

Can you group these things by other metrics? Say room size?

Answer 2

You could try to group places by type:

• vehicles (boats) - shades of blue,
• outside venues - shades of green,
• indoors - shades of red,
• single rooms (bedrooms) - shades of yellow.

Then show icons underneath.

This way, if you are looking for a Hall, you know at least that it's going to be red and it's easier to locate.

Answer 3

Does this need to be on a calendar, or would a listing view work? Each week could be grouped by day or venue. Thumbnails, as others have suggested, can provide a quick distinction. Lasvegas.com has an interesting layout to consider.

Answer 4

Is there actually a use case where your client will want to view all 17 venues at once in the week?

Maybe first you could start off by getting the user to select which venue slots they are looking at, then pop up the selected venues on the week? Without knowing exactly how the flow looks I'm not sure if this would work. But maybe the idea helps...

Edit: Thumbnail images of the venues might be an alternative to colours. Either thumbnails or you could use separate views for let's say boats and banquet halls. Thereby cutting the amount of colors for each view. Your client may not want two views however...

Answer 5

I strongly recommend avoiding using purely colors for categorizing content:

• 50 Facts about Color Blindness

• Color Blindness & Web Design

Instead, I'd recommend:

• using a combination of iconography and less colors (e.g. colors per type of venue for instance).

• looking at additional types of metadata to filter by (some ideas: by time interval during the day, by venue name, by venue location, by person reserving the booking)

I'd also recommend to possibly provide either a graph (bar chart perhaps), or some data giving a number on how many bookings each venue has:

• on average (maybe over a certain time period)

• the current week

• maybe with some suggestions by the system on what to book instead (to balance the bookings better)

I'd be happy to become more precise in my answer, but then I need to better understand the goal of the user. What is the use case?

Answer 6

What about using IdentIcon? Best to use a cleaner looking visual though, like they use on github. You could implement some colour-coding there too, so all boat-location icons have a blue hue, but in light of accessibility you might also want to make them all group visually - like with a wavy line (water) at the bottom, a roof for indoor .. some form of unification element.