User Interface for assigning times throughout the day

Question

I am designing a roster where each staff member can be assigned to a particular task for any 15 minute block throughout the day. In practice, there are usually two or three primary tasks, as well as a few breaks

e.g. On the Phone from 9am to midday, Lunch from Midday to 1pm, Processing Mail from 1pm to 5pm. 15 Minute Tea Breaks at 11 and 3.

Daily hours can fall anywhere between 8am and 8pm.

I am trying to design a slick interface for entering the tasks on a given day. I can think of two main options:

1: A list of tasks with start/end time text boxes, with a button for adding a new task. I would probably group it by Primary and Secondary tasks.

2: A table with selectable cells. When selection finishes, a menu to choose a task is displayed.

Can you think of any other simple way of editing this kind of information? Or can you think of a way of combining the two options without it getting too cluttered?

One common use-case I would need to account for is switching a staff member to a late shift - Basically just moving their start time forward, with all of the other tasks following suit. This is easy to do with the first model, not so easy with the second.

Answer 1

One option that I would think I would find appealing to use is to have 2 main elements:

1. A list of possible "tasks"
2. A calendar

Then, the behavior is to:

1. Drag/drop a task onto the calendar
2. Stretch that task to cover the time-slots desired
3. Drag/drop the lengthened task to re-position it as needed

Then, as tasks need to be rearranged, you can simply grab them and place them where needed.

I think I saw, in a demo video, that the new version of Basecamp has a similar feature in it's calendar, but I don't remember for sure. If I'm remembering correctly, however, I know that I liked how it worked and found it to be an incredibly intuitive way to rearrange tasks.

Answer 2

For starters I really like your interface ,even though it has more colors than what I normally use in an interface,its very clean and it gives me all the information I need.However the challenge I see with this approach is:

1) If you have a lot of cases where different work is being done in 15 minute intervals ,say Tea from 11:00-11:15,email from 11:15-11:30,Phone call from 11:30-12:00 and so on,you are going to have a lot of clustered icons if you go for the visual route

2) You are going to be pressed to define icons in your system for every work item the user might do.

The approach I might take are is similar to the excellent approach recommended by cdeszaq where I would provide users to select the coloumns and stretch them as needed and use a dropdown list to fill in details about the task to be performed.However since I would add two additional features to it which are :

1. Allow the user to specify certain icons for certain tasks (or build them within your system e.g. the teacup so that those time slots will be defined by those images or text if the user defines) - The reason I would prefer this is because people are visual in nature and having a visual representation of what to do would make it much easier than having to scan large blocks of text
2. While you can allow users to select tasks from a dropdown,also give them the flexibility of a free form text box which allows them to define their own tasks and give them an option to save it as an option (this might involve some development effort as you dynamically updating the dropdown so you might need to consider the cost benefit analysis of that)