Whenwhat

Anyone who plans events knows the problem: the programme is strong, the newsletter has gone out, the post is up – and people still miss the dates. Not because they aren't interested, but because actively checking is tedious and eventually forgotten. whenwhat solves this: organisers turn their calendar into a subscribable page, the audience signs up once, and every new event appears automatically in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.

An app for anyone with a programme

Theatres, festivals, sports clubs, schools, wineries, choirs, market traders: event calendars come in all shapes and sizes. whenwhat works for all of them. Organisers connect their existing calendar via ICS link or manage events directly in the web app. Public calendars for the audience, internal ones for the team – everything on one platform, no setup, no code. The audience subscribes with a single click and needs no app, no account, no repeated sign-up.

Any visual identity. On demand.

A jazz club in Bern looks different from a winery in Valais or a city theatre in Vienna. Capturing this range cleanly – without a calendar page looking like a generic calendar page – was one of the central UX design challenges. We built a system that keeps colours, typography and logo fully variable while remaining coherent and professional on every page. Organisers bring their own identity. whenwhat turns it into a page that feels as though it were built just for them.

Trivial problem. Complex solution.

Calendars sound like a solved problem. They aren't. The ICS format alone, which connects Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook, behaves subtly differently across clients. Then there are date and time formats: in German-speaking Switzerland you write «Dienstag, 12. August», in the French-speaking part «mardi 12 août», the wider DACH region has further variants, and English has others again. What sounds simple has to be solved correctly in software development for every language region, every calendar client and every time zone. Anyone who has once dived deep into event handling stops calling it trivial.

Client and contractor in one

Normally we work for customers who bring a briefing: a problem, a scope, an expectation. With whenwhat, we sit on both sides of the table. We ask the questions and we have to answer them. That brings its own kind of friction – productive, but unfamiliar. How do you agree on a name when everyone has an equal say? How much goes into brand research, naming rights and domain registration before the first line of code is written? How do you think about a product differently when you know you have to sell it yourself? And all of this alongside the ongoing agency business. whenwhat was always second priority – and still had to move forward. It taught us what it means to truly own a product.

Credits

Our services: Idea, naming, branding, concept, UI design, software development, marketing, sales, maintenance
Customer: Milk Interactive AG
Platforms: Web