Fun 4 Fam
As a mother I was always complaining about the daily organization: I have a freelance job, my husband a full-time job as employee and my two kids have a lot of appointments (school, sports and friends). Sometimes my Agenda is full of events/notes and at a first glance there’s no white space to add a coffee with friends. Sometimes I feel like in a cage. Incredible? No, I think it’s quite common among mothers. Then I had an idea: improve the traditional digital calendar to highlight your own free time, to better organize your own appointments and finally to change the feeling about your own life. I started asking other mothers how they use their own current agenda and how they feel about their own free time. Do you believe it? Every mother I asked to answered me she had no free time! But then, during our interviews, it turned out that they actually had free time, but not at all organized because the priorities are always on job and kids. Beside that I realized that time in a family is quite different than for a single person: in a family the time and the tasks are shared and have to be arranged/notified to other family members. Furthermore an appointment often involves more persons in a different manner. After crunching those thoughts I came up with my first prototype:
Normally appointments are marked without distinction or highlight with different colors depending on which calendar you set. From my research I learned that most of the people do not set any color to distinguish appointments and that too much colors at the end means no distinction at all. I allowed only three colors: red, yellow and green, as a traffic light, to distinguish how is the user involved into the event. If I have to go to the doctor, I’m for sure busy during that time and in this case I would set a red light. That means also “don’t call me” to other family members, if you notify them. If I have to bring and later pick up my kid from a sport activity, that means I’m involved only partially, because I have time for an in-between coffee or shopping meanwhile my kid has training, so: yellow light. If my husband goes out with friends, I’m not directly involved but I have to remember his appointment because I have to stay with kids and I cannot take other appointments, so: green light.
Another target was to give the whole family an overview preserving at the same time a little privacy. It’s not always necessary to share all appointments’ details, at least not with all the family members. I took inspiration from the traditional wall family calendar we’re still using despite the digital world in which we live: they have days organized in rows with each column dedicated to a family member. When necessary an appointment is visible to all family members; you can notify them and the appointment will be added automatically to their calendar. This is the same routine people have in the physical world.
The subsequent “user test” phase helped me to discover some usability violations. The major problem was for me to explain what the activity status was meant for. It is the core of this application and it’s important it is immediately understandable. Users testing the application often asked me what was the use of it. I added more information in my second prototype and I amended the design:
A second issue was the sharing process among the family members: I wanted that every family members could see at a first glance the whole family plan, but at the same time I wanted to have the chance to protect the private or negligible (for others) appointments. For example, a coffee with friends is important for myself but not a vital information to my kids. This was my first solution:
The user can see at a first glance every appointments of other family members, provided that they have been notified. By clicking on a different family member on the top of the calendar, the view is arranged based on that member but, still, it is not possible to see the private appointments of other users.
Finally an important violation that came up from user testing was that terms like “share to” were not clear and meaningful for users. Probably the word “sharing” doesn’t refer immediately to a notification, but more to “become public”. I changed the caption into “Notify to” and I got more reassuring results.
When I proceeded with the in-person testing I realized that my home page was not really intuitive to most of my users. Vertical columns and lines to show shared appointments were not immediate neither to digital native nor to digital naïve, maybe because they don’t follow the usual platform conventions. It was hard to admit it, but continuing along this way I would have worked uselessly. I went back hard on sketches to set up an homepage which could show at a glance all the appointments of a family and this is my final result:
Now events have more space and at the same time the user can see the event’s time and location together with the family member involved in the same appointment. Colors for the activity status are combined with the image profile, so that it’s immediately clear, for example, who brings Peter to the Iceskating training. For each user selected in the above navigation bar, events have a colored left border referring as well to the user activity status. In the online testing I did later, I had confirmed that this design was indeed more intuitive and clear compared to the previous one and brought advantages that I didn’t expect, icons for example. Most of user appreciated the icons’ customization for the events. Personally I find them more useful than colors to categorize events: icons are immediately recognizable, colors have a conceptual association with a category that you have to remember. Online testing was really helpful to find weakness and strength of application: observing other people using the application is extremely interesting and opened to me a new navigation path, that I experimented later.
Do you want to take a look to my application? It’s shared on Invision https://invis.io/9PA7OY3AV
Thanks for reading!