Beacon — Case Study · Po Chun Lin

00 The Reframe

A Schedule Is a Route, Not a List

Every calendar event has a place, but calendars only manage time — the travel between events is invisible until you’re late. Beacon started from that gap: what if your day rendered as a journey on a map, and your calendar could tell you when to leave?

Where does the time actually go?

Our interviews kept surfacing the same anxiety: not forgetting the event — forgetting everything around it. When to depart, how long to prepare, what to bring. The minutes between events were nobody’s job.

Time × place, one view

Beacon draws today’s schedule as a route: events are pins, travel legs show duration and mode, routines budget your prep time — so the app can work backwards to “leave now.”

The instinct aged well

Depart-time alerts, ETA sharing, voice event capture — the industry shipped all of it in the years after. This is the origin of how I think about Geo problems: geography is the context that makes time meaningful.

My Role (2-person team, honest split)

Led interview synthesis into the Calendar Experience Map
Designed the map system — route view, zoom semantics, travel legs
Designed the Time Slot module and watch + voice scenarios
Youn Lee led routine presets, notifications, and event flows

01 Research

Mapping the Experience Before Designing One

We interviewed calendar users across paper planners and mobile apps, then synthesized everything into an experience map — lenses, journey stages, what people did, thought, and felt.

Calendar Experience Map by PoChun Lin and Youn Lee — lenses, user journey across past experiences, in use and post use, with thinking, feeling and six takeaways

Two Takeaways Became the Product

“Let me capture a schedule anywhere — even driving”

Takeaway #1: input has to work regardless of situation. This seeded the watch + voice scenarios — hands-free capture for moments when the phone is out of reach.

“Don’t just remind me — tell me when to leave”

Takeaway #6: notifications should carry to-dos in advance — departure time, ETA, what to prepare. This is the seed of the whole time × place concept.

The quote we underweighted

“It’s annoying to set up the same notification every time.” We heard it, noted it — and still shipped a setup-heavy routine builder. More on that in the epilogue.

02 The Map System

Your Day, Drawn as a Journey

The screen I owned end-to-end. “Today’s Schedule” renders as a route: events are pins with time cards, and the legs between them show travel time and mode — the invisible minutes made visible.

Route view zoomed in: two events with time cards connected by a route with a 20 minute subway leg — Route view — travel legs carry duration and mode.

Route view zoomed out showing the whole day across the city — Zoom out — the whole day at city scale.

Route view with a passed event dimmed — Past events dim — the route knows where you are in the day.

The zoom levels carry meaning, not just magnification: zoomed in, you negotiate the next hour; zoomed out, you read the shape of the whole day. State changes (a passed event dims) keep the map honest about now.

03 Time Budgeting

Working Backwards From “Be There at 9”

A depart alert is only as good as its inputs. Time Slots let users budget the prep chain — shower 15, makeup 20, breakfast 15, commute 40 — so “leave by 8:05” is arithmetic, not guesswork.

Time slot list screen — Reusable time slots.

Time slot details with steps and durations totaling prep time — A morning chain totals your prep time.

Routine notification screen telling the user when to depart — The payoff: a notification that says when to go.

04 Beyond the Phone

Capture Anywhere — Even at the Wheel

Research takeaway #1 said input must survive real life. So Beacon extended to the watch: voice-first event capture and glanceable depart alerts, designed for the moments when hands and eyes are busy.

Scenario

“Hey Siri, make an appointment tomorrow at 9”

Driving was our stress-test scenario: no screen, no hands. Voice capture on the watch turns a dangerous phone-fumble into a two-second sentence, and the confirmation is glanceable.

Driver wearing a smartwatch creating a calendar event by voice while driving

Watch screen creating an event by voice — Voice event capture on the watch.

Watch notification telling the user to depart — Depart alert, glanceable.

05 Prototype & Test

Paper First, Pixels Second

The system grew from paper wireframes into a clickable InVision prototype we put in front of users for swipe-through testing — same screens, increasing fidelity.

Hand-drawn wireframe of the new event form

Hand-drawn wireframe of the preset module with morning commute steps

Where it started — New Event and the time-budget module, on paper.

Where it landed — the same flow, clickable and user-tested.

Key Flows, Animated

Three journeys through the final screens — onboarding into the route view, creating an event from a routine, and building a time-slot chain.

Onboard → sync → your day as a route.

New event from a routine, in five taps.

Building the time-budget chain.

🔄 Sync Account→ 🗺️ Route Schedule→ ➕ New Event→ 🧩 Routine Preset ⏱️ Time Slot→ 🔔 Depart Alert

The system in six modules — everything upstream exists to make the depart alert trustworthy.

The Scenario Film

Our InfoShow demo reel — the concept end-to-end, from morning routine to route view to depart alert.

06 Epilogue

What Shipped Since — and What I’d Redo

Eight years on, this concept reads like a roadmap of what the industry actually built. That’s the point of keeping it in my portfolio — and so is being honest about what student-me got wrong.

The Instinct Aged Well

Time-to-leave notifications, ETA sharing, voice event capture, calendar-map integrations — mainstream products shipped every core idea here in the years after 2017. We weren’t the only ones seeing it, but the direction was right: geography is the context that makes time useful.

What I’d Redo Now

Users told us routine setup was annoying — we built a setup-heavy routine builder anyway. Today I’d start from learned patterns over manual configuration, design for location-data trust from day one, and ship one hero moment (the depart alert) instead of a six-module system.

WHY THIS PROJECT STILL MATTERS TO ME

Beacon is where I learned that maps aren’t a feature — they’re a way of thinking. Every project since, from Booking.com’s trip timelines to unified support journeys, has been the same question at different scales: where is the user, where are they going, and what do they need to get there?