Product Design · In-House Build
Building a planner simple enough to need no instructions
Weekly’s brief was simple to state and hard to hit: the simplest possible weekly planner and to-do list, with a UI that needs no labels, no explanations and no onboarding — just open it and know what to do.
The brief
Most planner apps earn their complexity honestly — recurring events, multiple calendars, permissions, integrations. Weekly was scoped to deliberately refuse all of that. One recurring week, Monday through Sunday, that repeats forever. No dates to manage, no second calendar, no settings screen you have to visit before the app is usable. The goal was a tool a new user could open, understand, and use correctly within a few seconds — without reading anything.
Removing, not simplifying
Most of the build was subtraction, not addition:
- The note editor originally asked which day the note belonged to — removed once it was clear the answer was already implied by which day’s “+” button you tapped.
- Save and Cancel buttons were replaced with continuous autosave: closing the note — tapping outside, swiping it down, or pressing Escape — is the only “done” state there is.
- Two separate fields both labeled “Remind me” were doing the same job in two rows — merged into one control.
- A bordered card with a paragraph explaining “disable this note” became a single toggle sitting next to the note’s title.
- A “No time” toggle that lived in its own row moved onto the Time field’s own label, so the control explains itself instead of needing a caption.
Legible without reading
When two notes land on the same day at the same time, most planners either shrink the cards or add a “+2 more” chip — both require reading to understand. Weekly renders them as full-color cards glued together, so the board can be scanned by color and position, not by squinting at text. The same instinct shaped the swipe-based mobile day view (swipe left or right between days, swipe down to close the note editor), the long-press menu for editing, deleting or reordering a note, and custom select and time-input icons that look and behave the same way on iOS and desktop instead of falling back to whatever the browser defaults to.
Where it landed
Today, creating a note is: tap +, type a title, close it. Everything else — time, color, a reminder, disabling a note — is there if you want it and invisible if you don’t. The app ships in 8 languages — English, Polish, Russian, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian — with light, dark and automatic themes, and a first-day-of-week setting for people who don’t start their week on Monday.
Related tool: Weekly — a recurring weekly planner and to-do board.