A notation for a scheduling tool
Process
Discover
Sat with eleven schedulers. Nine of them kept a private spreadsheet beside the tool. Nobody had ever mentioned this in a support ticket.
Define
The spreadsheets were not recording schedules. They were recording the provisional ones — the state between “considering” and “committed” that the tool had no way to hold.
Develop
Three attempts. A draft mode nobody used, a comparison view that was worse than the spreadsheet, and finally a notation: provisional blocks drawn in outline rather than fill.
Deliver
Shipped the outline notation with a two-week overlap where the old export still worked, so nobody had to abandon their spreadsheet on faith.
The brief was “the scheduling tool is confusing, please simplify it”. The tool was not especially confusing. It was missing a state.
What the spreadsheets were doing
Every scheduler I sat with had the same workaround and none of them thought it was worth mentioning, because to them it was not a workaround — it was just how you do the job. They would sketch a week in a spreadsheet, move things around until it worked, and only then enter it into the tool.
The tool had exactly two states for a shift: it exists, or it does not. Entering a shift notified the person assigned to it. So there was no way to think out loud inside the tool. Thinking out loud is most of the job.
The two failed attempts
A draft mode. Obvious, and unused. Draft mode was a separate place you had to go to and come back from, and the whole point of the spreadsheet was that you could see the real week while you fiddled with the hypothetical one.
A comparison view. Side-by-side, proposed against current. It tested badly in a way I did not expect: schedulers do not hold two weeks in their head and compare them. They hold one week and perturb it.
The notation
What worked was not a mode or a view but a mark. A provisional shift is drawn in outline; a committed one is filled. They sit in the same grid, at the same time, and you can have both at once. Committing is one click and the outline fills in.
It is the difference between a sketch and an inked line, and every scheduler understood it without being told — which was the first indication it was right.
What I would do differently
I would have found the spreadsheets in week one instead of week three. I asked “show me how you schedule a week” and got shown the tool. The question that worked was “show me the last week you scheduled”, which made someone open a file they had not thought to mention.