Stop copying travel websites: how a common UI is hiding your best events
When customers come to your events page, what they want is simple: to find the right event, at the right time, quickly and easily.
And yet, for many Users on event sites, this is becoming a typical view when searching for shows by date and time.
At first glance, it seems like a good idea. It’s familiar, borrowed from the travel industry. While they work well for travel, allowing users to quickly choose dates for their holiday, it doesn’t fit user behaviours when searching for an event.
Why do calendar-UIs work for travel?
In travel, this pattern typically serves a singular purpose – finding and selecting start and end dates for holidays and flights. It is not required to support any other activity or present any other information.
This allows the calendar to be kept small enough, so it:
- Corresponds effectively to the related functionality,
- Doesn’t compromise on touch/ click target sizes and
- Maintains ease of information recognition/ readability
However, when this pattern is applied and extended to event sites, it no longer supports the event location behaviours of users, and things get messy.
So, why do calendars fail on event websites?
Calendars clash with your customer’s behaviour
Potential customers, especially those looking for live events, are primarily looking for a specific event - “I want to book tickets for Hamlet” - the date comes next.
Their mental model is to look for:
- The event
- If the event is on their preferred date
- An alternative date, if their preferred date is unavailable.
A calendar view flips this on its head. Your customers are being forced to visually, physically and cognitively navigate through multiple dates and layers of interactions to locate what they need.
Calendars make users overwhelmed and frustrated
Calendars ask users to retain information in their short-term memory, when the UI should be removing that cognitive effort. Immediately, this makes it more difficult for them to compare and contrast dates, times, locations and accessibility support listed across the dates.
As the full calendar is often not visible in a single view, users have to vertically (and sometimes horizontally) scroll the calendar to navigate and view the dates in a month. Plus, a large amount of content must be presented in each date block. As designers try to fit all of the information users need at this stage, fonts get smaller, and content design gets cramped.
What do your customers want from your website’s event catalogue page?
Looking through our over a decade of experience and research in arts and culture, we see consistent patterns:
- Users want to find the event first - whether they come from social, word-of-mouth or advertisements, they often already have an event in mind
- They want clear information - offer them easy and intuitive means of locating the dates, times and accessible performances that they need
- Your customers want intuitive filtering - don’t bury events, don’t make events compete with a giant calendar
A better way to help your customers find events
At Grandad, we’ve designed and tested an alternative that consistently outperforms calendar-first layouts. It prioritises the user's primary information need – the event – and offers them easy and intuitive means of locating the dates, times and accessible performances that they need.
Our What’s On Page Design gives users:
- A bold, imagery-led design that draws people towards the event that interests them.
- Predictive search that gets them to titles instantly.
- Smart filtering based on real user expectations (not assumptions).
- Pre-sorted and prioritised events, so key shows don’t get lost.
- Live availability, so users don’t chase sold-out dates.
- Rich event cards with times, trailers, accessibility info, and more — all visible at a glance.
This approach directly supports typical audience mental models. Find the event → pick a date → buy tickets. Simple, intuitive, effective.
We put this thinking to the test with Warwick Arts Centre:
Version 1.0 — The Calendar-Heavy Approach
Users kept getting stuck. Filtering was confusing.
Conversion rate: 6.78%
Version 2.0 — Cleaner, But Still Calendar-Led
This version looked nicer, but people still couldn’t easily find the alternative views.
Conversion rate: 5.9%
Version 3.0 — Event-Led, Audience-Led
We realised cinema-goers and event-seekers behave differently, so we split the journey.
Conversion rate: 7.5%
A small UX change + behaviour-led thinking = more tickets sold and fewer frustrated users.
We discussed all of the details of this project during our session at the AMA Conference - read all about it here.
Final thoughts
Calendar UI certainly has it’s place - in the travel industry - but not at such a key conversion point for your customers. When you design around real user behaviour, your programme becomes easier to explore, more enjoyable to browse, and far more effective at converting casual visitors into ticket-buyers.
If you’d like help rethinking your What's On page (or want us to review your current design), we’d love to chat - get in touch here.
That doesn’t mean calendars and events never mix
Despite the reasons covered above, our work with the cutting-edge Arts and Culture Venue BEAM Hertford caused us to rethink the calendar UI. Click here to read the case study and discover how we made a calendar UI that works.
