Timeline view needs more timescales added

[bg]

What is the proposed idea/solution?

Add additional timescales to the timeline views - particularly at the small end of the scale, for planning day-to-day tasks and single day events. Currently the smallest timescale is one day split into hours. We need 12 hour and ideally 6 hour timescales too, split into smaller chunks (ideally 5 min, but would be okay with 15).

How does is solve the user problems?

Currently the timeline view is clunky and difficult when planning items with only an hour or two duration, and the view doesn't provide enough room for details to be written into the box. Adding smaller timescales would fix this problem with minimal additional work for the development team and a huge increase in usability at the smaller timescales.

How was this validated?

Common sense and regular user frustration.

Who is the target audience?

Anyone with a need to plan items/tasks/events over a smaller time scale using the timeline view.

[Stephen_Orr1]

I can see how this could be useful when mapping out scheduled automations or meeting times at < 1 hour intervals. For 12 and 6 hours, you might prefer the 1 hour scale with the # of hours and/or time included in the label. 

[bg]

Absolutely! We regularly use it for planning speakers and workshops etc at single-day events, or tasks and meetings throughout the day, and for anything that's not right on the hour it's not very user friendly. To schedule something at a quarter past the hour we have to open the record and type it in. Decreasing the scale would allow the drag n drops to be more sensitive/accurate 🙂

[Hari]

I also need this feature in order to schedule film screenings and be able to drag and drop between hours, days and venues - all with the duration of the film (set run times) to stay the same. Currently, this is not possible with the small area for text on this daily scale. 

[serCebolla]

Agreed the smaller scale would have so many practical uses. I made a base to plan out load balancing a ton of scheduled processes and had to just make text fields for the time periods, would have preferred to visualize the results in a timeline using actual small 5 minutes or so time blocks. It would also be great to have expanded timescales in the upper range as well. Every time I start a project in airtable for timelines, I realize it's useless because I'm looking at a timeframe over 100 to 200 years and need to see the whole thing zoomed out in one view to include in reports. The max scale of 5 years means scrolling forever and never seeing the relationship between the records over time.