ChromeOS experimenting with separating calendar widget from quick settings to simplify its usage

I woke up to a ChromeOS Canary update on my Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, and after applying it, I scoured the entire OS for changes, only to miss the one that was the most obvious and right out in front of my face. I looked at the bottom-right of the display only to notice that the date had been separated from the time clock.

While this may not seem significant at first, it marks an important glimpse into the ideation process of the development team. For anyone who’s currently testing the Google Calendar event widget that can be turned on via a developer flag, you’ll know that it’s not always your first thought to click on the date instead of the whole quick settings button as a whole.

This sort of acts as a whole button with several clickable and hoverable hotspots for the time, date, Wi-fi, and battery, but it’s not exactly the most user-friendly from a UX standpoint. Most people see a button and they click it, and the quick settings are an oval pill-shaped button that almost gives the impression it has one function because, well, clicking it pulls up everything in addition to those separate functions.

So, it would seem that Google is looking for ways to make it easier to understand what’s happening on the ever-increasingly cluttered chromeOS shelf and to interact with it with less confusion by splitting the time and date into their own pill-shaped buttons. The unfortunate part about this update is that as soon as I updated again, and all within the same morning, this neat UI feature was gone from both Chromebooks it briefly appeared on.

While at first strange looking due to the asymmetrically shaped sides of each pill shape, the two buttons together make up one single oval still, so even though it looked weird to me at first blush, I immediately took a liking to it for its simplicity. Because it was pulled almost as soon as it was released on ChromeOS Canary though, I’m willing to bet that the developers are still thinking through what the best implementation will be before it reaches the masses.