Some changes you notice the moment you log in, even though nothing new has actually been added to the app. This is one of those. Table rows — Events, Services, Visitors, Message templates — used to end with a row of small icon buttons. From now on, a single labelled button sits in their place: Actions.
It looks cosmetic. In reality, it fixes the thing that got in the way most on a phone — and it's a decision that deserves an explanation. Icons are supposed to be faster, after all. So why take a step back into a menu?
What Was Wrong With the Icons
An icon isn't a word. A pencil and a trash can are easy enough to guess. But in the events list, there were six of them standing side by side: download, calendar, share, copy, pencil, trash can. Which one schedules time slots, and which one makes a copy of the event? Someone who uses it every day remembers it. Someone who uses it once a month guesses again each time — and with one of those icons, a mistake can't be undone.
A tooltip is only for a mouse. The label that appears when you hover a cursor over an icon never shows up on a touchscreen — a finger has nowhere to "hover". On a phone, all you had was the shape of the pictogram, and nothing else. And some icons didn't even have that label: Edit and Delete, in Message templates, had none at all.
They were small, and the dangerous one sat right next to them. The buttons were 28 pixels, even though the recommended touch target is roughly 44. The trash can sat right next to the pencil, the same size and the same shade of grey.
On a phone, they were also hidden behind the width of the table. On a narrow screen, the table scrolls sideways, and the Actions column was last. To reach it, you first had to scroll the whole table to the right — and do it again for the next row.
What It Looks Like Now
Each row now has a single Actions button. What happens when you click it depends on your device:
- On desktop, a menu expands, and every item has both an icon and a word — Schedule your event, Share, Copy, Edit, Delete.
- On a phone, a panel slides up from the bottom across the full width of the screen, with rows sized for a thumb. Its header shows the name of the record you're working with — the visitor's email, the event's name. In a long list of similar rows, that matters more than it sounds like it would.
- Delete and other irreversible actions are separated by a line and shown in red. Not grey and stuck right next to Edit.
- On a phone, the Actions column comes first in the row — right after the checkbox, if the table has one. That's the spot you can see without scrolling sideways. On desktop it stayed on the right, exactly where it's always been.
Why One Button, Not Icons
Icons are a shortcut for something you already know. They work great when there are only a few of them and you use them daily — a back arrow, an X to close. With six actions, half of which you only need once in a while, the advantage flips: you save half a second on the click and pay for it in seconds of thinking, plus the occasional wrong tap.
One button splits one hard decision ("which of those six little pictures is the one I want?") into two easy ones: I want to do something with this row — and then I read what my options are. Reading is slower than recognising a shape, but it's never wrong.
There are three more practical reasons behind it, too:
- A row is about data. Name, email, date, capacity — that's the information you're actually looking at the list for. Six icons at the end of every row are visual noise that repeats as many times as you have rows.
- The same everywhere. We've reworked 28 tables across 18 screens this way — including all seven on the Visitors page. Learn it once, and it applies across the whole app.
- It scales. A new action is now just a new row in the menu, not another icon squeezing the table further sideways. Two actions that used to need their own column — applying a message template and editing a service order — moved straight into the menu, and the tables got one column narrower.
The price for that is one extra click on desktop. We knew about it when we made the decision, and we accepted it: a click costs half a second, an accidentally pressed trash can costs a lot more.
Where You'll See It
We've redone every list in the app this way: Events and Services, every tab on the Visitors page (Visitors, Bookings, Service orders, Lists, Blacklist), Prepaid Plans and their Membership usage, Message templates, Forms and their responses, service Availability, Webhooks, and Account Users.
There's nothing to switch on or configure — the change is already live in the app, in all 31 languages micali.online runs in. If you're missing an action you'd expect to see in some menu, let us know: the list of actions for a row now lives in one place, and it's simple to change.
