This is the home interface for an earlier iteration of Today, a daily planner created by my friend Adam.
He's since updated it, but I thought this was a great example of an interface that is already in a pretty good spot. To me, it's at or even slightly above industry standard, but there are a few small details I think could be refined to push it even further.
Inconsistent Icon Styles
The plus icon in the Create button uses a filled style, while all other icons use an outline style.
Too Many Vertical Rules
There are four different implicit visual rules being established here:
Toolbar Complexity
The toolbar has a bounded visual appearance, but for no functional gain. It's adding unnecessary weight and noise. The bigger issue though is the order of items feels non-standard on iOS. Typically, the primary action would be on the right, emphasized in some way, with additional actions on the left.
Inconsistent Visual Style
The toolbar also has a fine outline, but no other elements in the interface or visual language use this treatment.
Divider Inconsistency
Task items have visible dividers, but the secondary list below does not. We should standardize on one treatment.
Text Styling
The category label here reads as both too small and too bright for its purpose. We should also consider tokenizing this to differentiate it from the user text of the task titles.
Toolbar
We can simplify the toolbar by removing the visual container, and use more standard floating buttons instead. We can emphasize the primary action visually, and move it to the right side of the screen.
Finally, we can update the icon style used to be consistent with the others in this interface.
Alignment
We can simplify to just two visually dominant vertical rules here. The section header, task content, and secondary list items share a consistent left edge, creating a cleaner visual hierarchy.
We can also tighten up the padding here to make things more balanced.
Dividers
Let's add a divider to our secondary table view to be consistent.
Category Tokens
We can style the category labels as tokens, to clearly differentiate them from other user entered text.
We can also refine the styling so they read more clearly as secondary data.
Dividers, again
After looking at this, I think it might be simpler without visual dividers, so let's remove them to see what that looks like.
This demonstration is a work in progress (please forgive any bugs), but I wanted to give you a small preview before launch. I hope you find both the format and the content useful.
This will be one of nearly 30 lessons, interactive demonstrations, and videos available in the Library. I'm excited for you to browse around!