At long last, I’m pleased to introduce On-Call Optimizer’s new calendar interface, designed to simplify how you interact with your on-call schedules and assignments.
While our initial focus was to ensure On-Call Optimizer’s flexible scheduling and hassle-free swap functionality offers life changing benefits to your team’s on-call practices, it’s now time to deliver an improved UI that ensures you can intuitively and easily benefit from those powerful abilities.
Home View
The new home page presents your first interaction with the calendar interface in On-Call Optimizer.
You’ll immediately see your assigned shifts across all schedules, alongside availability information from your configured calendars.
Calendar Navigation
The default month-based view offers a familiar way to visualize your schedule. For different perspectives, the top-right buttons allow you to switch to a week view or a paginated list of events.
Navigation is straightforward: use the buttons in the top-left to move through time periods. When reviewing past or future schedules, the ‘Today’ button quickly returns you to the current time period, helping you maintain context as you plan.
Shift Pop-ups
Hovering over or clicking any calendar event reveals a detailed pop-up:
These pop-ups provide essential information at a glance and offer direct access to common actions like taking shifts or initiating swaps as described in the popup docs.
Schedule Overview
The ‘Overview’ tab for individual schedules presents another key calendar interface in the system.
This comprehensive view displays all current, past, and upcoming assigned shifts, giving you complete visibility into the schedule’s assignments.
The color-coding system makes it easy to identify which team member is assigned to each shift. Blue tones indicate primary on-call roles, while purple tones represent secondary roles (when applicable). This visual differentiation helps you quickly assess coverage patterns across your team.
The example screenshot also demonstrates how upcoming unassigned shifts appear on the calendar, with the date on which they will be assigned highlighted. This forward-looking view makes the lifecycle of ongoing assignments and the dates on which the next assignment will occur obvious and easy to plan around.
Availability for Upcoming Shifts
The ‘Members’ tab offers a specialized calendar view showing aggregated team availability alongside assigned and upcoming shifts.
This view helps identify potential scheduling challenges. By seeing all member availability in one place, it’s immediately clear to everyone if and when crunch points in assignments are going to occur.
Coming Soon
With the calendar view now firmly established as the core of On-Call Optimizer’s interface, additional improvements and capabilities are in development:
- Customizable calendar layers, allowing you to control which information types (shifts, availability) appear, tailored to your specific workflow needs.
- A context layer for use while reviewing new or pending assignments which will show the historical assignments that informed On-Call Optimizer’s assignment of the shifts under review.
- Improved historical views: The current ‘Assignments’ tab will evolve into an interface showing schedule snapshots at specific points in time, highlighting the shifts added, removed, or changed by each confirmed assignment.
For teams who haven’t yet experienced the benefits of flexible scheduling and hassle-free shift swaps, On-Call Optimizer now offers an even more familiar interface making it easier and faster than ever before to get started!
Try the new calendar interface today and see how it improves your team’s on-call experience.
Finally, please keep the feedback coming as we continue to iterate and improve On-Call Optimizer.
