Events list or calendar view?

Question

A client has asked for a section to be added to their website that shows information about regular events taking place at their venue. There is just one venue, and all events they want to include take place on the same day and time each week, and are recurring for at least several weeks. There are currently 5 regular events that take place, but that number is likely to go up to a dozen or so.

They expressed an interest in having a weekly and/or monthly calendar to display the events, but my opinion is that it would largely be redundant (each week being near enough identical) and a list view, with what's on ordered by day, for example, would be more appropriate.

Does anyone have any metrics or thoughts on which approach would be more appropriate?

Answer 1

As someone who is working on similar apps: client is right for two reasons.

First, benefit of week view is showing items organised. Empty spaces, same patterns of items, position of the items, distance of different items etc.. they have all their own meanings which are quite easy perceive for majority of the users. On the other hand, list view requires more attention to pick up the data you need and benefit of visualized information is missed.

Second, in agenda view you have many equipment to improve your app in the future but as you said, if the number of items increases fastly, list view will fail to handle it since it fits better for small number of items. As rule of thumb, if the number of items is more than 4 in a list, it becomes more and more difficult to perceive all the items.

Lastly, month view would just be a "nice to have" view for user to see overview of the items but it is not often used both to obtain/to give data to calendar.

Answer 2

I would go with just

thu 
25th May          EVENT NAME 
-------------------------------
thu
01st Juni         EVENT NAME
-------------------------------

I dont see how it can be unclear if event will be recurring.