CURRENT PRACTICES
1. How do you create your calendar?
2. How do you update and add events to your calendar? Walk us through the process of adding a new event.
3. How often do you update your calendar?
4. Where do you get your events?
5. How do you decide which events to publish on your calendar?
6. Are any of your events limited to specific audiences, or would there be a problem publishing all your events on a website that viewable by the public?
7. What type of database do you use to store your events?
8. What technology do you have available to you in your department (e.g. web server, application server, database)?
9. Do you save drafts of your events somewhere before publishing them?
10. Do you keep an archive of past events?
11. What do you like best about your calendaring system?
12. What do you like least about your calendaring system?
13. What would it take for you to switch to a different calendaring system?
14. How important is maintaining the "look and feel" of your calendar? What, if anything, about the look and feel do you think it would be important to maintain?
15. Would be willing to switch to a new calendaring system if it met your needs better than your existing application and offered a tool that would make it easy to create a calendar display?
PUBLISHING EVENTS TO OTHER CALENDARS
16. Do you ever or would you want to post your events to other calendars? Which calendars would you post to?
17. How would you feel about storing your events in a centralized repository?
RECEIVING EVENTS FROM OTHER CALENDARS
18. Would you be interested in receiving events of interest to your users for your calendar from other calendars?
19. By what criteria would you like to filter incoming events that you would consider publishing on your calendar?
20. Would you want the ability to edit the description of events that you received from other calendars?
SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT
21. In an ideal world, how would you like to display your event data (e.g. list, calendar format)?
EVENT DATA
22. What data elements (fields) would you like to see in your calendar? (e.g. Title, Time, Location, Speaker, Description, etc.)
23. Would you like to break down the names of speakers and other people involved in an event into first name and last name, or is just a name field sufficient?
24. What types of event restrictions are commonly used (e.g. grad vs. undergrad, different levels of faculty)?
25. Do we need to distinguish between enrollment, reservation, and ticket required?
26. Do people need a 'supplemental info' field (which holds things like location notes) or would they just put these things in description?
27. Do you have many different types of event sponsors (e.g. local - "The French Dept." vs. corporate "Wells Fargo")?
28. Do you often have events which are grouped under a "parent" event (e.g. a conference or lecture series)?
29. Would your users like to search for events targeted to people within a certain age range?
FOLLOW UP
30. Would you be interested in helping us evaluate our prototype?
31. Are there any calendar users that you’d recommend that we interview?