Agenda view
also called schedule view (google), up next (community)
The same events as a chronological list grouped by day, so the next thing is at the top instead of somewhere inside a grid.
An agenda view is the same events a scheduler draws as blocks, set instead as a list running down the page: a heading per day, and under it the day’s events in the order they happen. Nothing is positioned by time, so nothing is sized by duration either. What the reader gets in exchange is the one question a grid answers badly, which is what happens next. The next thing is the first row, and it stays the first row no matter how empty or how crammed the week around it is.
That trade is why both views exist and why a view switcher is not indecision. A grid answers where, so it wins when the reader is hunting a free hour or moving a meeting into one. A list answers when, so it wins on a phone, on a watch, in a notification, and any time the interface has a column and not a canvas. The switcher is the place the reader says which question they are asking.
A list also has to say something a grid says for free. In a grid, a free day is a column of blank cells and needs no words. In a list, a day with nothing in it either vanishes, which quietly makes the week look busier than it is, or it gets a row of its own saying so. Spelling it out is almost always right, and it is the same reasoning as any other empty state: absence is information, and information needs a place to be printed. The day headings usually stick to the top of the scroller while their day is on screen, so the reader always knows which day they are reading.
The name needs care, because it has pointed at two opposite things.
FullCalendar used agendaWeek and agendaDay for the
day-and-hour grid, then renamed those to timeGrid in version 4, while Google Calendar
went the other way and renamed its chronological list from Agenda to Schedule. So a
document that says “agenda view” may mean the grid, depending on which library and which
year it was written in. On this site the grid is the scheduler and the list is this, and
neither borrows the other’s spelling. Note also that a list of what is coming is not a
list of what happened: a stream of past events is an activity feed.
Which word?
| If you want | say |
|---|---|
| events as a list, with the next thing at the top | agenda view |
| hours down, days across, events as blocks in the grid | scheduler |
| a month laid out as a grid of days | calendar |
| the running list of who did what, most recent first | activity feed |
Related
See also: Empty state