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September-December, 2019

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Research in the field of shared calendars has mostly been restricted to calendars shared within families or workplaces, instead of friendships. Bødker and Grönvall summarize the three core uses of family calendars:

1. Coordination and Negotiation: to work out a shared understanding of what, when and by whom something should be performed,
2. Review and reminders: to provide an overview (short-term and future) of what activities will take place and act as a to-do list and finally
3. Awareness: provide and understand what other people within a family are doing and where.

Our project will primarily focus on the third use (awareness). We want to make it easy for users to see when their friends are available and to easily find time to meet. The secondary purpose of our project would be the first use (coordination and negotiation). Following awareness of available times to meet, we would like our users to be able to decide what to do during that time. Our project will splinter from the second use (review and reminders) as events posted will not serve as a traditional posting on a calendar (eg. a family dinner or office meeting you must attend). Instead posted events will serve more as open invitations to whoever is willing and available to join.

References:

1. Hutchison, H., Bederson, B. B., Plaisant, C., & Druin, A. (2003). Family Calendar Survey . University of Maryland. Retrieved from https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/1236
2. Bødker S., Grönvall E. (2013) Calendars: Time Coordination and Overview in Families and Beyond. In: Bertelsen O., Ciolfi L., Grasso M., Papadopoulos G. (eds) ECSCW 2013: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21-25 September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus. Springer, London

Reviewing Existing Applications

We found that shared calendars are often cluttered and unreadable as well as a privacy issue when forced to share one's entire agenda. Meanwhile, most users consider event invites to be too formal and inflexible for planning laidback hangout sessions.

Design Options

After a few iterations, we narrowed our design options to three: calendar view, list view, and single card view. Ultimately, we landed on the list view as the calendar view was too cluttered and better suited for time management purposes and the single card view was too slow to navigate and difficult to track down specific events.

Storyboards

Prototype

Users had difficulty understanding the meaning of the “+” button on each page and others did not realize it was clickable. Therefore, instead of the same "+" button, we replaced the "+" with a more specific icon on each page (e.g., a calendar with a +-sign for adding an event and a person with a +-sign to add a friend). We also changed the background of the button to make it clear it was clickable.

Users were confused whether “My Events” were events the user was attending or the events the user was hosting. Thus, we decided to change the vocabulary to “Hosted Events” to avoid confusion between all events, and events hosted by user.

Users showed some uncertainty ("Is that it?") when sending a friend request. So, we added a confirmation message after the user sends a friend request.

Instead of navigating to a new page for each event detail, we changed it to a modal window, giving users a stronger sense of where they are in the app.