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Cookbook · Personalization

Color-code the planning board with indicators

Admin ~10 min

Indicators turn an abstract property into a color planners can spot instantly. Define them once in administration, and planners can apply them by drag-and-drop or bulk update from the indicators panel.

Before you start​

Pick the right kind of indicator first. There are four, and they are not interchangeable:

  • A category answers what kind of work is this. Order type, work type, status. An appointment has exactly one.
  • A time marker answers what is happening during this appointment. Lunch, standby, travel, a customer meeting inside a longer job. Also exactly one.
  • A pin answers what kind of thing is this on the map. Pins live on tasks, not appointments, and have no planning board equivalent.
  • A tag answers what else do I need to know. Tags are the only multi-valued kind, and they are currently in preview.

The category and time marker distinction is the one to get right up front, since both are single-valued colors and it is tempting to treat them as the same thing. The rule of thumb: use the category for the classification you sort and report on, and the time marker for the state that changes during the day.

Also worth knowing before you start creating things: the back-office application is usually the master for indicators and sends them across with the planning data. What it typically does not send is what each one should look like, because that is a visualization choice. So in practice you create indicators by hand only when the back office is not doing it, and spend most of your time on appearance.

1. Define them in administration​

Each kind has its own tab in indicators. Click Add, or the pencil to edit an existing row. Each tab exports to CSV, and the search box earns its keep once a catalog outgrows a screen.

Categories carry one extra column, Outlook Preset, which maps the category onto one of the fixed Outlook category colors. It only matters if you sync appointments to Exchange, in which case it keeps the color a planner sees in Outlook aligned with the board.

2. Choose colors that survive a dense board​

This is where the recipe succeeds or fails, and the reason is that the four kinds render at wildly different sizes. A category fills the whole appointment bar; a time marker gets a thin strip on it. Indicators has the exact mapping of each kind to where it appears.

Two consequences follow from that size difference. Categories dominate the board, so they want the clearest and most distinct palette you have, and a subtle category color washes out everything around it. A time marker only ever gets a sliver, so a low-contrast color there is effectively invisible no matter how good it looks in the picker.

See appointment visualization for choosing a palette that holds up.

3. Put the indicators panel on the workspace​

The indicators component does double duty: it is the legend that tells a planner what the colors mean, and it is the fastest way to change them. Add it to the profile from the Profile menu.

Without it, a new planner is looking at a board of colors nobody has explained.

4. Apply them​

Drag an indicator from the panel onto an appointment. Validation runs during the drag: a green check in the tooltip means the drop will land, a red cross means the target is not a valid appointment and the action is cancelled. Locked appointments and records the planner cannot update refuse the drop regardless of what the tooltip said.

For more than a handful, select the appointments on the board first, then click the bulk-update icon next to the indicator. One round-trip instead of fifty drags.

One behavioral difference to flag to planners: dropping a category or time marker replaces the current value, because there is only one slot. Dropping a tag adds it to whatever tags are already there. Drop three tags and the appointment carries three. Clearing them is a different gesture, via right-click and Remove tags, or one at a time from the appointment card.

Verify​

Load a board with real data and check it reads at a glance, from a normal viewing distance, without hovering anything. If you have to squint to tell two categories apart, the palette is wrong, not the planner.

Last updated on by Hendrik Bulens