Cadence

Studios that sell days do not think in calendars. They think in a grid of people down one side and weeks across the top, and they want to see, in one glance, who is free in March. Every scheduling tool we looked at insisted on showing them a month view with events in it.

One screen

Cadence has one screen. People down the side, weeks across the top, one cell per person per week, and colour only where something is at risk. You can drag a booking; you can split it; you cannot open a modal, because there is nothing to put in one.

The whole product is that grid plus a settings page nobody visits twice. It took eleven weeks to build and about a year to get down to.

What we cut

• Notifications. Studios are twelve people in a room; the room is the notification.
• Approval workflows. The person who moves a booking is the person allowed to move it.
• Reporting. Two studios asked, then admitted they export to a spreadsheet regardless.

What I learned

The bookings are not the data — the gaps are. Once we started rendering free capacity as the positive shape and bookings as the ground, people started using the tool to plan instead of to record. That was one afternoon's change and it was the entire product.