User Observations & Interviews

Interviewee 1 - Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad is a father of 4 children.His children participated in different activities and have very different schedules, though three of the four played soccer for both club and high school teams. His wife is in charge of keeping all of the schedules updated but he helps, which requires gathering information off the school website, or from school handouts, and usually also involves contacting other parents to make sure that no event is glossed over.

He is usually not the parent in charge of the children's schedule, but he is always helping to make sure that they are where they need to be at the right times by either ferrying them around himself or organizing rides for them, be it coordinating with the mother to pick them up/drop them off or arranging with other parents to take a group of kids around. Organizing things with other parents can prove difficult, because it’s hard to know which parents to contact as their availability will naturally be based on their kid’s schedule. Even if something is arranged, sometimes they need to be reminded of their responsibilities.

This Dad is technologically savvy, keeping digital calendars with all of his children’s schedules, and has an address book containing other parents and viable helpers. He also began to use email more as it became popular, although now that his children can drive, he no longer needs to contact other parents for help.

What we learned:

• Effort is required to gather necessary information concerning scheduling events
• Coordinating with other parents can be difficult
• Contacting other parents for help usually happens one at a time through phone calls, although email is getting more and more popular and allows easy mass communication with several other parents
• Digital calendars and organized address books are helpful

Interviewee 2 - Single Mom

Single Mom is a mother of 4 children. She keeps a master calendar of all of her childrens’ activities, which she updates as is needed. However, she finds herself neglecting the calendar quite often. Most of the recurring activities are already second nature to her, so no calendar is needed. For events that are one-offs, she’ll keep paper notes in her purse, which she’ll prepare for the day as needed.

What we learned:

• Keeps a master calendar storing all her childrens’ activities
• Repetitive tasks allows her to recall from memory and neglect the calendar
• Uses paper notes for quick access
• Looks at the calendar at the beginning of the day to see if there is anything unusual.

Interviewee 3 - Father of Five

Father of Five is, self-explanatory, a father of 5 children. His children are very active in school and extracurriculars. There is some overlap, however, his children have different interests (playing instruments, different sports, dancing recitals, etc). He works from home and tries to stay active in his children’s lives. His wife, who also works, is in charge of updating the yahoo digital calendar that contains all the events for the family. They try to update the calendar regularly. They get notice of upcoming events through digital media such as email and shutterfly in addition to common interaction with other parents over the phone or at school events. When schedules get tight, they contact other parents to carpool. They express concern with better daily notification.

What we learned:

• Get notifications of events both digitally and through phone conversations
• A lot of effort required to manage work along with childrens’ daily schedules
• Updates are necessary to keep track of changing schedules for each child
• Seek help from other spouse/parents for carpooling and convenience

User Classes

Parents
Parents will be the most common user class, and are responsible for organizing the schedules for the entire family and driving kids to a from activities. Parents may contact other parents if they need help getting their children to or from an activity. This class could include both power users (parents with many children that often need to contact other parents for help) and novice users (parents with few children that don't often contact other parents for help but still need to organize their schedules).

Activity Organizers
The activity organizers are responsible for creating and distributing the activity schedules to parents.

Children
Children are usually not involved in planning, but they are responsible for knowing their own schedule each day and who will be driving them to and from activities.

Needs and Goals

We recognize that scheduling can be a very general problem, so we will focus our design on meeting the needs and goals of our user classes:

Parent:

• Keep track of all of the kids’ schedules.
• Be able to easily update these schedules as needed.
• Be able to share the schedules with others to assist carpool planning.
• Keep track of friend parents in the system.
• Be able to easily contact other parents.
• Confirm plans with other parents ahead of time, and at the time of a scheduled event.
• Emphasize non-repeating events because users easily recall repeated events.
• Maintain privacy with select events when desired.

Event Organizer:

• Easily create and distribute schedules.
• Reach out to all parents using a calendar to communicate changes.

Child:

• View calendar.
• Know who is going to be driving them to and from activities for the day.
• When older, children may want to update their own schedule.
• If old enough to drive, a child can help parents with driving, and so will need to closely communicate with parents.