The Family Calendar

Today modern Families struggle with parents pursuing a career while still trying to keep up with family and friends. This gives less time to manage the tight schedule of each family member’s activities. To address the issue with keeping track of different activities have I developed “The Family Calendar” (TFC) a prototype for a phone application that enable each family member to add and sync events and activities with a simple interface. TFC breaks new grounds as a calendar application with a super simple interface for adding and managing events. The application also has a simple and easy access to get an overview of upcoming events and show the events in a traditional calendar view.

The TFC application is designed as part of a course in Human Computer Interaction from UC San Diego given online at Coursera. During the course have the application been iterated based on heuristic evaluation, user testing and A & B testing. The basic idea for TFC came from interviews with families about how they manage and keep track of events. The interviews revealed that few families keep track of upcoming events using digital aids such as calendars in phones, in computers or online; due to the perceived complexity of available solutions.

TFC was introduced as a prototype and during the design phase was the prototype iterated, incorporating feedback from test users regarding how new events could be added. The heuristic evaluation of the TFC’s two different paper prototypes, show that a few functions were missing or should be changed to be easier to understand. Figure 1 show one of the day-views in the paper prototype. One of the missing identified things was the day-view, and I decided to make a page for it to get a better overview. I also found out that users want to be able to delete an event and have information/help about the application.

Figure 1 — Paper prototype of the first day-view.

After the heuristic evaluation was TFC implemented as a prototype and two users tested this prototype. Figure 2 shows the prototype before and after user testing. The user testing reviled a lot of valuable feedback, corrections like the possibility to add events in the day-view page and to make color improvements to make text easier to read.

The redesign was confirmed using A/B testing, were two user tested the original design and two users tested the redesign. The A/B testing reviled that both designs where used and both of them will be used in the final design.

Figure 2 — The figure on the left hand side shows the TFC prototype before testing and the figure on the right hand side shows the prototype after adopted changes from user testing.

The whole design process was enjoyable, exciting and I learned a lot that I will try to use in my daily work as a tester.