An Exploratory Study of Calendar Use

An Exploratory Study of Personal Calendar Use Manas Tungare, Manuel A. P´erez-Qui˜nones, Alyssa Sams Center for Human-Computer Interaction Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA, USA {manas@tungare.name, perez@cs.vt.edu} Abstract In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how peo- ple use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our partici- pants 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, exam- ples 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. 1 Introduction Personal Information Management (PIM) is receiving attention as an area of re- search within the CHI community [Barreau et al., 2008, Bergman et al., 2004, Teevan et al., 2006]. PIM research mostly is concerned with studying how people find, keep, organize, and re-find (or reuse) information in and around their personal information space. Calendar management, one of the typical PIM tasks, is done today using a variety of systems and methods, including several popular paper-based methods: At-A- Glance, one of the largest suppliers of paper planners, sold more than 100 million calendars in 20001. For computer-based systems, calendar management is often integrated into email clients (e.g. Microsoft Outlook); it is one of the most common applica- tions in all personal digital assistants (PDAs, e.g. Blackberries and iPhones), and there are several online calendar systems (e.g. Yahoo! Calendar, Google Calendar, Apple Mobile Me). Date- and time-based information is ubiquitous, and is often 1http://www.allbusiness.com/consumer-products/office-supplies-equipment/6579063-1.html 1 arXiv:0809.3447v1 [cs.HC] 19 Sep 2008 available through many means such as postings on office doors, displays with dated announcements, through email conversations, written on wall calendars, etc. The result is that calendar information tends to be pervasive. In this paper, we set out to explore how people use calendars in the presence of varied technological options. We are interested in understanding how calen- dar information is managed given the availability of these platforms. After a brief review of related work, we proceed to discuss our findings from the survey, inter- views, and artifacts. From these, we suggest several opportunities for designers of future electronic calendar systems, and conclude the paper with a discussion of future research in personal information management. 2 Related Work There is a long history of calendar studies in human-computer interaction litera- ture. Early research on calendar use predates electronic calendars. In 1982, Kel- ley and Chapanis [Kelley and Chapanis, 1982] interviewed 23 professionals to dis- cover how people in the business world kept track of their schedules. They found that for the individuals interviewed, calendars were indispensable and showed a lot of diversity in their use. The use of multiple calendars was prevalent, and a wide variation was seen in the time spans viewed, as well as in other aspects such as archiving, editing and portable access. Many of the problems identified in pa- per calendars could be solved in electronic calendars, and they concluded with a list of features for emerging electronic calendars to implement. Soon afterwards, Kincaid and Pierre [Kincaid et al., 1985] examined the use of paper and electronic calendars in two groups, and concluded that electronic calendars failed to pro- vide several key features such as flexibility, power, and convenience, that paper calendars did. They recommended many useful features to be incorporated into electronic calendar systems as well. Nearly 10 years after Kelley and Chapanis’ original study, Payne [Payne, 1993] conducted interviews with 30 knowledge workers about both calendars and to- do lists, followed by a task analysis of his observations. He concluded that the central task supported by calendars was prospective remembering. Prospective remembering is the use of memory for remembering to do things in the future, as different from retrospective memory functions such as recalling past events. Payne reported that other uses of calendars were not as well-supported by sys- tems at the time: features such as automatic scheduling were found to be detrimen- tal, since it allowed users to schedule appointm

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