Design Session

Goal Nail down some candidates for the Design team to go out an interview as Target Users/ User Groups for our 0.7 Dogfood calendar tenet...

Proposed Target User for Chander 0.7 (Calendar specific)

I'd like to ask a favor from everyone who is attending to send me a digital photo (or I will scan it for documentation on the wiki later) of a person (this can be a friend/family member you know) you think would be a target user for Chandler 0.7.

Before selecting the photo of your friend/family member, please think about:

• Why would they be user?
• When would they use Chandler, specifically to calendar? At home or in the office?
• Who would they be trying to connect with? Sharing the calendar?

Agenda:

• (15-20 mins) Discussion of the photos people have brought in. (Depending how many photos are sent to me)
• (15 mins) Brainstorm the different categories of these users (similar to notes below/wiki)
• (15 mins) Identify usage scenarios at a high level
• (5 mins) Next actions - Mimi/Priss to go out into 'real world'.

Aparna's User Namu

• Close friend
• Profession: Chemical Engineer, recent
• Cancer Foundation in Houston
• Husband: Doctor, Mac user at work and home
• Manages their social calendar and social events for foundation
• Very organized person
• Windows user

• She is the planner
• Won't convert to each other's platforms * Uses paper calendar for events
• Share calendars
• Both for Work and Home

• ie Home: taking the car for servicing
• ie. Work: dinner events for the foundation
• Foundation: not sure of size
• Sharing the calendar to the Foundation
• Is she the primary poster?

*Mimi's User" Susan and Neil

• Neil is the Photographer: Mac
• Susan runs the business: Mac and Windows
• Keeping track of equipment
• Keeping track of travel dates to schedule new jobs
• Assistants
• Tracking tasks and schedules
• Use for Home too: When are kids visiting
• School events
• Vacations
• Movie night

Katie's User" Katrin and Gunner

• FLOSS folks
• Katrin not an engineer or usability expert
• Co-workers
• Activist promoting open source
• Motivated to user Chandler
• Early adopter, but not tech person
• Organize a lot of events: collaborative events
• They are their own staff
• Coordinating with each other: Planning their next event
• When should it happen
• The people they schedule with are not in their work group or people they see all the time
• Both very busy
• Scheduling is not in the standard work day
• Home schedules really impact work events as well
• Wants to use open-source
• Gunner used to be a software engineer
• Aspiration: Holds conferences that further their agenda
• Just the two of them...with a board
• Katrin is the press contact: outward focused
• Wants to keep their ear on the Open Source/Web 2.0 space: subscribe to lots of feeds, calendars, blogs, mailing lists

Tony Stone

• Micro-credit organization in Honduras
• Take money and give small loans to the rural poor in Honduras: mostly women
• Motivated to use Chandler because it's free
• They don't have a budget for Exchange
• Scheduling: loan officers go out into the field to meet with loan groups
• Schedule their regular loan group meetings and workshops: Health and AIDS awareness
• In an office setting
• What kinds of computers do they have
• Size? Not very large, maybe 10 loan officers
• A lot of travelling. Their expansion is gated on how many Toyota 4Runners they can buy.
• Using the computer at the office
• Tony comes to the US
• Wants to move here and go back there intermittently
• Meets with the board
• One person who is very busy
• Share with his wife who is a board member
• Majority of usage is for work...plus some stuff for Home
• Sharing his personal calendar with loan officers
• Conferences? He organize little group of donors that they meet through friends or word of mouth
• FYI calendars? Bunch of other non-profits that are like this. Gremine Bank pioneered this.
• Meets with other people who are running similar non-profits
• Might have meet-up events

Arlo

• Home calendar
• Esther keeps 5 calendars
• Vet appointments
• Flea medications
• When we go out of town
• Who picks him up, drops him off
• Easier to figure out important his dates if he has a separate calendar
• Instead of just merging it with
• Carl is a pilot (sig other)
• Keeps track of his flight s
• Birthday calendar
• Carl and Esther calendar for events they both attend
• Can see the difference between the different events
• Better way to separate who cares about what (ie. Carl doesn't care when Esther gets a haircut)
• Carl mostly views the calendar on the web interface
• He keeps his own calendar on Outlook: several of his own
• Esther updates Carl's Outlook calendar
• Outlook calendar for Carl is managed by a different exec assistant at Carl's company
• Send email back and forth to each other
• Hey: tell Katrina to take you off the calendar for these dates
• Then Esther checks his calendar to make sure that he did it
• Wants to be able to drag and drop events from Katrina's calendar with her own iCal calendars.
• Different OS
• Overlay is key: figure out when it's good to be away
• Often turn calendars on and off: ie only my stuff
• Planning vacation: would want osaf calendar+personal+mitch to figure out good dates

Ted+Family

• 2 macs, 2 ical instances + a private webDAV server behind a firewall
• non-work calendar
• work calendar
• julie calendar
• calendar for kids: lessons and family stuff
• osaf calendar
• holiday calendar
• other people's events

• stuff unique to ted
• other groups, scheduling meeting in the off-hours
• no central calendar for these groups (all by email)
• travel to sf: fill up evenings with people after work hours
• conference stuff: shepherding the conference as well
• need to know all the deadlines etc

• 7 calendars in ical
• julie's calendar
• julie subscribes to his work and home calendars
• he has separate work and home calendars
• cuz osaf people don't care about his home stuff
• julie can't edit ted's calendars, but ideally she could
• making changes: verbal half the time, the other half is email
• julie needs to change an event. she needs to check with ted and then he says okay...
• family calendar, ted doesn't have write access to
• ted has a personal calendar that doesn't merge with family
• would want that merged into a single calendar
• working group stuff that isn't work, that goes in personal
• don't want to have that many calendars
• don't need to distinguish between personal stuff versus family stuff
• # of hours of non-overlap at home: 8 hours
• julie is out frequently with the kids: play-dates
• ted is paralyzed when julie isn't home to answer schedule questions (ie. can she get ted to the ferry to go to sf?)

John's User Helen

• Helen a great procrastinator
• Really good at organizing 2.5 tasks
• Exercise
• 1.5 work projects
• John reminds her of her other tasks that she never does
• He could put stuff on her calendar for her
• Challenges: in her work she does UI design and web design and user documentation
• Hesitant to use bad software
• Easy to use, fast and performant
• High bar for usability
• 1-way: John uses the calendar, Helen gets reminded
• Everything is all in her head
• Shoes are worn: buy new shoes
• Backseat of her car was broken,but wouldn't fix it
• How are you reminding her now: suggests things once every while
• Brings it up every month
• John isn't a good nagger
• Calendar would remind her
• Would she look at the calendar? Alarms would have to pop-up occasionally. Wouldn't proactively turn Chandler on to look at it.
• Questionable whether Helen wants the reminders.
• But in the end, she does want the reminders.
• She ignores emails. Would she ignore reminders as well?
• Inbox gets to be 10,000 items, never organizes anything.
• Remind you 2 weeks before: talk to tax person or you will pay
• Really important event for your father
• Timed events versus Tasks that need to get done
• Consolidate tasks with trips cuz La Honda is out of the way
• John saw that list: Having a "When we go over the hill" list of things to do. @Palo Alto list (ie. buy shoes)
• John only does things convenient or critical. Tries not to run her life.

Jason

• Uses calendar for work
• Never use a calendar for anything at home: cuz he has no life
• Real heavy calendar users
• 8-10 conference calls per day + mtgs
• Travels a ton
• No one managing his calendar, does it himself
• Outlook/Exchange
• People can send him mtg requests that go right on his calendar
• Can't deal with entering it himself
• Does he input stuff himself?
• Over 50% is sent by other people
• He can't always get mtg requests via email/phone
• Relies on others to set up mtgs for him (even mtgs he's owning)
• Wants to share his calendar
• With Sheila...to look at details
• Jason phones to ask Sheila who he's meeting with
• Doesn't have a PDA
• Sometimes he doesn't have his laptop, or is on his way
• Look at his calendar for him (doesn't happen that much)
• Helpful to be able to see the details
• Sheila organizes all the Home stuff
• Needs to know when he's away
• Sheila remembers where he is that he's in London
• Usually tells her verbally, send his ticket confirmation to Sheila
• Thought about having a home calendar
• His work schedule rules, so it's hard to schedule things
• Changes the timezone a lot. Has a lot of calls with people in other timezones
• Jason doesn't see Sheila's calendar
• Most of his meetings are with people outside of his company
• So outside people interface with his company's sales guys and they figure out Jason's free-busy
• One-click to get it on the calendar
• Would he edit the home calendar with Sheila?
• Jason wouldn't edit
• Be useful for him to be able to read
• See when Sheila travels and when her plane gets in
• His work, it would be useful for them to share details on calendars
• .Mac account? webcal?
• Wouldn't view the shared calendar unless it was apart of his Outlook environment

Bryan Stearns

• Maintains meticulous records of film festival
• Gets the info electronically, email, RSS feeds

Mari

• Shifts in a business

Lisa's user: Aunt Pia Poole

The target user in this picture is my aunt, Pia Poole. She runs her own business finding "home stays" in Vancouver for people visiting from other countries (e.g. learning English). She needs to schedule times to view the rooms available in peoples' homes, and manage a bunch of email from people interested in offering or finding rooms.

Since her business is run from home, she'd use a calendar on her computer at home. I don't know for sure if she has a mobile device that she brings with her.

She'd probably share her calendar with Tom (also in the picture), my uncle, so that they can coordinate household activities like who is driving Christopher (my cousin) to his next hockey game. I don't know if she has other calendar sharing needs -- maybe it would even be useful for my cousins to be able to see her calendar (they're aged 16 to 20)

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Next actions

• Mimi and Priss workflows
• Interviews