Design of a mobile app with a company meeting calendar
Dentons is a tool built for an international law firm that needed a dedicated mobile app for managing the working calendars of its legal teams. It handles scheduling meetings, delegating responsibilities, notifying participants of changes, and an assistant model in which assistants maintain the calendars of the lawyers assigned to them. The project covered the whole UX/UI process – from an analysis of roles and permissions, through system logic and prototypes, to the full visual design for phones and tablets, in line with a brand book supplied by the client that laid down firm rules for the brand. Style guides of that kind cover not only trademark usage and colour but also the feelings the brand should evoke and how it should be presented – the style of photography to choose, the phrasing to use in messages to the user.
Stage 1
Preparation
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Design documentation
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Wireframing
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UX scenarios and user flows
Analysing roles and organisational logic
The first step was understanding how a law firm actually works and what its different user groups need. The app has two main roles – lawyers and their assistants – each with its own permissions and limits. Together with the client’s team we went through the use cases and mapped out the logic of invitations, acceptances and delegation. That diagram set out plainly who can invite whom to a meeting, who accepts it, who can see other people’s calendars, and in which situations something extra is required – giving a reason for declining an invitation, say, or flagging a scheduling clash.
Prototyping as part of design
Doing the analysis and workshops early let us avoid the ambiguities that so often appear in applications with elaborate roles and dependencies. A planning stage like this is good strategic UX practice – it creates clarity, cuts down technical misunderstandings and shortens the time it takes to ship the finished product. Using tools such as a flow chart and a low-fidelity prototype let us test the logic of the app quickly, without having to build an interface first.
Prototype of the mobile app
Stage 2
Design
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Mobile app design
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Extended responsiveness
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Animation, micro-interactions
Mobility, accessibility, clarity
The next stage focused on designing a modern, legible interface. The visual design was made for mobile working, on phones and tablets alike, with an adaptive component layout and a responsive grid. We kept to mobile-first principles while making sure people working from larger screens were equally well served. The app follows established industry practice:
- a clear distinction between primary and secondary actions,
- a system of icons that aid orientation,
- a clear information hierarchy,
- and consistent navigation following the bottom navigation pattern on phones and split view on tablets.
Designing for how it is actually used
We designed around the context of use: meetings at a law firm often involve many people, are arranged well in advance and need coordination across several participants. So each event carries lists of organisers and attendees, statuses (accepted, pending, declined), reasons for declining and additional notes. The notification system follows the timely and relevant principle – people are alerted to new events, changes of date and scheduling clashes. All of it was captured in a scalable design system with UI components ready to implement.
Stage 3
Implementation
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Tablets and phones
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Pre-launch testing
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Extra rounds of revisions
Permissions are the basis of security
The central technical challenge was a consistent mechanism for handling multiple calendars, plus assistant accounts able to manage meetings for several assigned staff. We made sure that switching between calendar views, editing events and filtering information stayed smooth and intuitive. The answer was a container architecture with logically separated calendar data in the UI layer, without losing fluid switching between them.
A living calendar
Meetings can be moved, edited and updated live, and the notification system tells every participant about each change automatically. The app detects scheduling clashes and surfaces them visibly, following proactive error prevention – heading off bad decisions while the meeting is still being created.
The calendar mechanics were designed for heavy daily use, with event sorting and quick filtering by person, meeting type and time. That is what makes the app an everyday working tool – intuitive, fast and safe.
In summary
Dentons is a mobile app for a law firm that combines precise team calendar planning with a clear, modern interface. It supports lawyers, their assistants and meeting organisers inside large corporate structures. By analysing roles, needs and working habits, and by mapping out the logic of invitations and responses, we built a system grounded in real usage rather than theoretical schemes.
The whole visual design was built on a detailed style guide and brand book supplied by the client. That is excellent practice: it sped the design process up considerably and guaranteed visual consistency with the brand. With typography, colour, iconography and tone of voice already settled, we could go straight to the functional layer without risking aesthetic drift. If you do not have a brand book, our team can create one from scratch, as part of building a brand or refreshing an existing one.
The project is an example of a carefully run B2B mobile design process – from wireframes and interaction logic, through responsive design for phones and tablets, to the details that matter in daily use: the notification system, how meetings are presented visually, detailed contact information and the reasoning behind the invitation flow. It is a tool that supports how a law firm organises its work at the highest level.