Adding appointments to a calendar: soft modal vs modal dialog

Question

I'm reinventing the wheel and creating a day-view calendar within my WPF app to facilitate making customer appointments. I'm basing my design off Google Calendar and Outlook. I noticed that both of these calendars allow you to add appointments by clicking on the calendar itself and also via a "Create/Add" button in a toolbar.

I'd like to know people's opinions on whether I can get away with just using the click on the calendar method (a soft modal)? I personally find that I very rarely use the toolbar method when I'm using Google Calendar. Also, my app will not need the same level of features as Google Calendar/Outlook which makes a large modal dialog hard to justify. Implementing both methods seems like unnecessary work to me.

Answer 1

From a UX stand point providing both methods to a user is very helpful. Some user might not realize that they can click/double click the calendar to create an event, so the additional button provides them with an intuitive method of creating a new calendar event. Also if a user wants to create an event in the future without moving the calendar to said date, the button should provides that capability.

Answer 2

I agree with Jeff that both methods are required - one allows you to quickly add and event to a date in the current view and the other allows you to add an event to a future date without scrolling to it.

Regarding the event details input - if you use full page, enable Ctrl+Click to open it in a new tab, if you use a pop-up, don't disable/hide the background. - In both cases, users may want to look at the calendar while filling up the new event (e.g. copy details from existing events (e.g. title, contacts) or quickly browse through dates).

The main add-new-event feature from Outlook that I find missing in Google is the option to duplicate an event to another date by dragging with Ctrl or by clicking and Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V.