Shared Calendars Link Family Members
By Gabe Goldberg, HCIL Media Fellow
As I write this, I'm struggling to plan what my wife and I will do next weekend and when we'll get one of our cats to the eye doctor (yes, cats have eye doctors). Why is this a struggle? Because my wife is 250 miles away, visiting her parents.
We have been, of course, talking and emailing. But scheduling events is often iterative, requiring coordination with friends, restaurants, and Animal healthcare providers. Repeated conference calls aren't a practical household tool.
And our lives are relatively simple, mostly only requiring managing two adults and one health-challenged cat! Others must mesh complexities of their multi-tasking, multi-generational, distributed extended families.
Research by the University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) delved into how technology can best match and serve family dynamics, often simple on the surface but in fact quite complex. The focus was on "calendaring" -- tracking what's planned, who's involved, when and where. Though well explored and commercialized in office settings, this hasn't much been a home-use topic.
Replacing existing ad hoc calendars requires great care. First, reliability is key; technology problems can quickly doom consumer products. Second, simplicity rules; too complex or numerous technologies -- like today's proliferating remote control units -- make things worse. While families suffer with too many unconnected calendars, forcing them to adopt a single integrated calendar can be as painful as using a supposedly "universal" remote control. And without remote access -- remember my traveling wife -- solutions are of limited value.
Researchers Catherine Plaisant, Ben Bederson, Aaron Clamage, Hilary Browne Hutchinson, and Allison Druin crafted a small study, involving three families. They first learned their attitudes towards technology, using "cultural probes" (disposable cameras, diaries, and Post-It notes)to gather information about their daily lives and communication habits. Next, low-tech prototyping exercises made the families comfortable with helping to design tools. Then "technology probes" (globally shared digital Post-It notes and slow-scan video images) gathered usage data, field-tested prototype technology, and (perhaps most important) inspired users and designers to brainstorm.
These latter probes confirmed that an important requirement across cultures and ages is coordinating between and within households. Families were found to often use multiple calendars on walls or refrigerators. This led to conducting a Web survey (http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hilary/survey/survey.htm) which drew more than 400 responses. While respondents weren't randomly selected, results were interesting and valuable.
Significantly, only 17% of respondents used a single calendar, while commonly reported problems included using too many calendars, being unable to access calendars remotely, paper or electronic calendar spaces too small for convenient writing, and software compatibility issues. And many people mentioned difficulty dealing with uncertain or fuzzy events -- tentative plans, commitments not yet tied to specific time/date/place, etc. Finally, synchronizing and duplicating calendars took too much effort and was somewhat error-prone.
At this point, research focused on a multi-generational family living in three households: the Juniors (two parents and two school-age children) and two nearby sets of grandparents. Technology probe results showed that families wanted more awareness between households, better coordination of events (e.g., childcare and visits), and reliable hardware and software.
Technology was developed to connect Microsoft Outlook, already used by the Junior family, with grandparents' handwritten calendar entries, created via a data-capture pen and digitally printed paper. This allowed participants to view all calendars together with synchronized navigation and the ability to (for example) zoom to a day view on all calendars simultaneously.
The grandparents liked seeing their childrens' and grandchildren's schedules and checked them at least daily. They had no difficulty entering pen data. After a time, one grandmother wanted to start typing her input because she felt her written entries were not neat enough. Allparticipants learned from the shared calendar and also used it for reporting news. It served as a grandparents' memory aid, eliminating their asking repetitive questions about events or plans. The more tech-savvy Junior family saw similarities between the shared/global calendar and the presence sensing and interaction of instant messaging.
While teaching and learning lifestyle tools require time and patience, rewards of improvements in this area are clear, including enabling/encouraging/supporting increased familial interactions, serendipity in daily life, and combining serious use with fun such asplaying spontaneous games and sharing quick jokes.
