Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Usability problem with E71 calendar

Beware: it seems that the improved calendar in Nokia's E71 has an usability problem that will effectively delete your calendar history. This has been reported to me by a couple of independent users and it seems that there is a need for an application that would allow user to recover his lost calendar data. Worse enough, if you don't understand immediately what has happened and you sync your calendar account to your calendar server, data will be lost there, too.

What happens?

You have calendar open with a month view, looking like this:



Then you decide that the visible event should be deleted and you select Options->Delete



Because you have used calendar a lot, you don't look at the options very closely. Normally the first selection item will delete the selected entry and you select that. Unfortunately this time it will delete your calendar history.



Who reads confirmation prompts anyway - yes, I want to delete this entry!



At this point you might get an uncomfortable feeling that things aren't as they should be. Now you'd need an undo-command but that's not available.

Unlike other S60 devices the widescreen E71 displays individual calendar entries also in month view and user gets a wrong idea what he is about to delete. Users are also so bored with confirmation prompts that more experienced people just hit automatically OK without reading the prompt. Either the UI should be changed in E71 or user should have access to undo-command that could recover the lost data.

//Harri

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I just did this and removed my entire calendar!!

Most most most annoying!!!!

Gonna have to ring round to get my appointments back! GRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Pigville said...

I didn't even know this could happen but it just happened to me about 5 minutes ago. Any chance I can get my entries back? I haven't synched my phone with iCal in ages!

Harri Salminen said...

Hi,

I'm afraid that your calendar entries are now gone, entries are deleted from the terminal's calendar database and as far as I know there is no way to get them back.

I haven't checked this posting for a long time and it seems that screenshots have disappeared from Blogspot/Google servers. Sorry about that.

//Harri