Halcyon came to us with a scheduling product that had four ways to look at the same week: a calendar, a list, a board, and a timeline. Each had been built for a specific customer who had asked for it. Each was somebody's favourite.
Their problem was not that any one view was bad. It was that new users had to choose one before they understood the product well enough to choose. Fewer than half of them ever came back.
The uncomfortable week
We spent the first week watching eleven people try to schedule their first week of work. Nine of them opened the view selector, hesitated, and picked whichever was first. Two closed the tab.
The finding was not subtle. What was hard was the conversation afterwards, because every view had an internal champion and a customer who had asked for it by name.
We were not arguing about the interface. We were arguing about which promises we were allowed to break.Dana Okafor, co-founder of Halcyon
What replaced it
One planning surface. A single canvas showing the week, where the density of what you are looking at changes as you zoom rather than switching to a different screen. The board people got their columns back as a grouping control. The timeline people got a horizontal zoom.
- Onboarding went from eleven steps to four.
- The view selector was removed entirely — no setting, no migration path, no legacy mode.
- Two features that fewer than 1% of accounts used were deleted rather than ported.
The result, and the caveat
Activation in the quarter after launch was up 38%. Support tickets about scheduling dropped by roughly two-thirds.
The caveat is worth saying plainly: four accounts cancelled, and two of them wrote to say why. Removing a feature is never free, and any case study that tells you otherwise is leaving something out. The trade was clearly worth it. It was still a trade.