In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
Several interesting design concepts have been suggested to make electronic calendar systems less error-prone and smarter. These cover a wide range, from systems that retrieve tasks from email messages @cite_7 , to systems that learn from users' behavior to recommend intelligent defaults @cite_3 , to calendar systems that predict attendance at events @cite_30 . @cite_36 assessed the effectiveness of a priority-based calendar prototype and concluded that integration with other personal information systems (such as email) would make the system more useful for users. Visualizing calendar information on desktop computers and mobile devices has been explored in several studies @cite_4 @cite_11 .
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_36 @cite_3 @cite_11
2128207755 2057811494 1964994389 1983748693
This article is an interview study of calendar use and a cognitive analysis of the interactions between the design of calendars and the task of prospective remembering. The study and analysis are coordinated to present a general critique of current electronic calendar designs and to note opportunities for future designs. The interview data reveal continued use of paper calendars in a highly computerized setting. A key conclusion is that paper calendars support prospective remembering by promoting browsing of existing appointments during subsequent calendar keeping but that this advantage is compromised in current electronic designs. Other aspects of the interviews and the analyses address the representational limitations of both paper and electronic calendars. This research explores a methodology in which design implications of qualitative empirical data are understood and systematized through theoretical analyses of existing artifacts. Digital devices today have little understanding of their real-world context, and as a result they often make stupid mistakes. To improve this situation we are developing a database of world knowledge called ThoughtTreasure at the same time that we develop intelligent applications. In this paper we present one such application, SensiCal, a calendar with a degree of common sense. We discuss the pieces of common sense important in calendar management and present methods for extracting relevant information from calendar items. Manufacturers of integrated electronic office systems have included electronic versions of the calendar in almost every system they offer. This paper describes a survey of office workers, carried out to examine their use both of paper calendars and of electronic calendars that are commercially available as part of integrated office systems. It assesses the degree to which electronic calendars meet the needs of users. Our survey shows that the simple paper calendar is a tool whose power and flexibility is matched by few, if any, of the current commercially available electronic calendars. Recommendations for features that should be included in electronic calendars and automatic schedulers are included. In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.