Berkeley Campus-Wide Event Calendar

Team Roles

• Documentation Manager: Allison Bloodworth
• Design Manager: Myra Liu
• Evaluation Manager: Nadine Fiebrich
• Group Manager: Zhanna Shamis

Revised Problem Statement

Due to the decentralized nature of computing on the Berkeley campus, different schools, departments, and other campus organizations often create applications on an “ad-hoc” basis. The lack of campus-wide guidelines and standards for designing and building applications make it difficult for developers to plan for interoperability and reuse. Consequently, the Berkeley campus is inundated with applications serving a similar purpose and repurposing similar content but built with different technologies and based on different, and often incompatible, data models. Although this is the case for many types of applications on campus, our group has decided to focus our master's project on creating a campus-wide calendaring application. The creation of this central campus calendaring system and repository would allow different campus departments and organizations to easily share their event information.

Characteristics of Primary Users & Their Goals

There are two classes of users for our project: calendar owners, and calendar users. For this project, we will focus only on the creation of the Calendar Management tool for the audience of the calendar owners. Calendar owners will use this tool to create a customized calendar display for their website and select events. Calendar owners are usually department, center, or campus organization employees who are interested in promoting their departmental events. They want to create customized calendars showcasing their events and other relevant campus events. Their calendaring needs differ based on the types of events they wish to list, their level of technical proficiency, and departmental political considerations.

Access to Participants

Due to our involvement with individuals who are part of campus organizations interested in this project, we have excellent access to participants. Jon Conhaim, e-Berkeley Program Director, Jeff Kahn, Webmaster of the UC-Berkeley News Center, several members of the Cal-Agenda calendaring system staff, and two members of the Lawrence Hall of Science staff have been involved in this project for several months. They have provided us with many contacts, and we have already interviewed twelve calendar owners. We also have additional calendar owners lined up to do testing of our prototype. Most of our team members work on campus, have been involved in classes and activities in different departments, and have extensive social networks. Therefore, we will have no problem finding calendar users to interview.

Initial Design Suggestions

Though our project involves a total information system, for this class we intend to focus only on the design of the Calendar Management Tool. The major premise for our project is that there will be a centralized repository of Event data that will be shared with all participating calendars on campus. However, calendar owners will be able to mark their events as “private,” in which case the events would only be viewable on their own calendar, or “public” which means the events are available to other calendars to display.

As we are building the event management portion of the Calendar Management Tool that will allow users to select which events are displayed on their calendar, we will evaluate several calendar management systems currently used on campus (e.g. WebEvent, CalAgenda, Calendars for the Web, www.calendars.net) and use these and other popular calendaring systems (e.g. iCal, Outlook) as a starting point to determine what an ideal event management system would look like. It will be important that we find an efficient way for calendar owners to search for events in the repository that are of interest to their users. Our application will be based on an Event data model appropriate to UC-Berkeley that began as part of a CDE project. However, we will also allow calendar owners to customize the fields used to describe an event to ensure that users aren’t overwhelmed with fields that are unnecessary for the calendar they are using.

The calendar creation portion of the Calendar Management Tool must serve the needs of very technically oriented as well as non-technical calendar owners, as there is a wide range of technical skill level of calendar owners on campus. We expect to utilize some type of scaffolding to meet the needs of these various users. We will give users the flexibility to customize their calendar in a clear and straightforward manner. We will also offer one or more standard calendars for users who do not want to do any customization.

Explanation & Justification of Personas & Goals

Our team began the needs assessment process by interviewing twelve different campus calendar owners with diverse backgrounds, different priorities, and widely varying technical skills. We interviewed both technical and content managers of these campus websites. Our interview questions focused on the current practices used by these calendar owners to maintain their calendars, their views on publishing events to and receiving events from other calendars, their suggestions for improving their calendars, and the type of event data they collected. Our interviewees included the managers of what we have categorized as 6 low-tech calendars, 4 medium-tech calendars, and 1 high-tech calendar.

Our four personas were developed in an effort to illustrate the differing backgrounds, needs and constraints we saw in our interviews as well as potential needs we have identified in conversations with these and other campus employees. We plan to design a system that will be useful to both “high-tech” calendar owners who have already created dynamic websites, having invested time and/or money in their current calendaring system, as well as “low-tech” users who would like to revamp their web calendar, and even currently calendar-less website owners who just haven’t had the time to create one. Because a primary advantage of our system is that it would allow campus calendars to more easily share event information, we created personas that are highly receptive to this idea. However, because it is important that we design a system that will appeal even to those who have no interest in this feature, we also created personas that are ambivalent towards it. We will need to attract all these different classes of calendar owners so that there will be enough participation to make the shared event repository meaningful.

Persona #1 - Megan Richardson

Technology level: Med-low

Interest in sharing events: Medium

Unique situation: Currently has no calendar, would like to send events to other calendars and receive events from other calendars

Megan Richardson is the 22-year-old UC student and member of CalPirg, the California branch of a student organization whose mission is “to deliver persistent, result-oriented public interest activism that encourages a fair, sustainable economy, and fosters responsive, democratic government.” She is from Boston and has been maintaining the CalPirg website in her spare time. Megan created her first website as a high-school senior using Dreamweaver. She understands basic HTML, but is not very familiar with data-driven websites or cascading style sheets. As she has not yet worked in the business world, she has also never used a personal calendaring system such as Outlook.

CalPirg sponsors 8-10 campus events each semester, such as rallies against hunger and homelessness or for clean and affordable power. The organization attempts to publicize these events to its members and the general public by posting them on their website and sending emails out to their mailing list in order to increase attendance and catch the attention of legislators. However, because Megan is very busy with schoolwork and activism during her senior year and not many of the other CalPirg members have website design expertise, they have not had time to redesign their website in order to present their events in a coherent, easy to use, calendar-oriented format. Megan would love to have a tool that would automate the creation of a functional, well-designed calendar for the CalPirg website. CalPirg might also be interested in publicizing other campus and community events that support their mission in their calendar, as well as publicize their events in other calendars to increase attendance at their events. Megan would not want to spend more than an hour setting such a system up, and could spend only about a half hour per week maintaining information on CalPirg events. CalPirg has about 4-5 major events a semester, and 2-3 events that occur on a weekly basis. If a nicely formatted calendar could even increase attendance at their events by 10%, it would be well worth her time.

Megan’s Goals:

• Create a simple calendar or list of events as well as send out emails on events that her organization sponsors on their website in order to encourage the participation of members and the public in these events without having to hire a programmer
• To ensure that their website supports the organization’s mission, which is to deliver persistent, result-oriented public interest activism that encourages a fair, sustainable economy, and fosters responsive, democratic government
• To spend most of her time on schoolwork and activism, and less time on the technical details of managing a website

Persona #2 - Harold Jackson

Technology level: Med-high

Interest in sharing events: High

Unique situation: Campus Event Aggregator, they don’t “own” any events

Harold Jackson is a 40-year-old Program Manager in the Public Relations office of the UC. He is a Los Angeles native who enjoys walking his dog and playing tennis with his wife, who is a programmer. He is responsible for overseeing the maintenance of the UC website and Calendar of Events. It is essential that the website project a professional image, as it is an important means of advertising the university to the general public, alumni and potential donors. Harold’s background is primarily in public relations, but he has also acquired technical skills along the way, and is the primary maintainer of the UC website. Although he is familiar with the concept of building a data-driven website, the back-end of the university website was built by an outside contractor, and most of the staff in Harold’s department are not as technically savvy as he is. Harold and most of his group are familiar with calendaring systems such as Outlook or ICal, and use the CalAgenda calendaring system to schedule meetings.

Harold’s ultimate goal in relation to the campus calendar is to publicize as many events occurring on the UC campus as possible, and to highlight especially important events on the website. Currently events are submitted to the university calendar via a web form, and not many departments currently enter their events in this fashion. As a result, Harold’s staff has to spend time contacting various departments to find interesting events to post to their calendar. Harold thinks that if he could somehow find a way make it easier for campus departments and organizations to send him events, he could greatly increase the number of events he would receive and be able to publicize. In evaluating a new system, however, he would want to ensure that it is at a minimum an improvement over the current system in terms of functionality, and offers a design that integrates with the overall UC website.

Harold's Goals:

• Create a web-based calendar that will be the ultimate aggregator of all events at his university, which will be used by the public as well as people at the university
• “Market” the university to potential contributors and the general public by highlighting the diverse and exciting events that occur there
• Ensure that the calendar looks professional and eye-catching, and integrates with the overall “look and feel” of the university website
• Make the process for entering and approving events as easy as possible so that even “low-tech” users in his department can do this
• Encourage other calendar owners to send him events

Persona #3 - Sally McNeil

Technology level: High

Interest in sharing events: High

Unique situation: Model must handle parent-child event relationships & allow the use of cascading style sheets

Sally McNeil is the 35-year-old webmaster for the university’s science museum. She is from Michigan, loves to travel, and often takes exotic vacations with her husband and two children during school breaks. Her manager has tasked her with revamping the organization’s website in order to draw more visitors to the museum. As families and schools usually only visit the museum once a year or so, they would like to encourage new people who may be traveling from farther distances to visit. She feels that giving visitors to her website information on related events and activities occurring on campus might be a good way to bolster attendance. Sally has extensive web programming experience, and her website is currently dynamically generated. She works with a java programmer on the website, and both of them are familiar with XML. She and her programmer have thought a lot about the best way to format a calendar-oriented website, and have even prototyped their best ideas. She wants to find an easy way to include events from other departments, without having to cut and paste them into her calendar. She also would like to be able to maintain the appearance of her website using cascading style sheets.

Sally's Goals:

• Use the website to increase attendance at the museum
• Create an eye-catching, dynamically-generated calendar that will allow parents and teachers to easily plan trips to their museum
• Include events occurring at the university that may be of interest to their patrons, so families and groups traveling great distances to reach the museum can “make a day of it” and attend other events during their time in town
• Clearly list events that have a “parent-child” relationship on the website so that it is easy for visitors to find what they are looking for (e.g. “Forces that Shape the Bay” event during which many different daily presentations occur)
• Use cascading style sheets to maintain website look and feel

Persona #4 - Nina Sanchez

Technology level: Low

Interest in sharing events: Low

Unique situation: Political constraints on event listings & need to send email when new events are added

Nina Sanchez is a 27-year-old Program Coordinator of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She is single and has a very active social life. She lives in the Mission in San Francisco where she often attends art openings, musical events, and goes dancing whenever she gets the chance. She manages the office of her small department, including scheduling seminars and classes, fundraising, and maintaining their website. As their department often deals with political figures that may hold strongly opposing viewpoints, the members of her department must always be careful to avoid potential clashes between their visitors. This includes ensuring that people who would not want to be associated with each other are not featured prominently on their website at the same time.

Nina works with the Program Director to recruit potential speakers and secure funding, and uses the website to advertise their many events. They would not want to include events other than their own, as they see the website as a marketing tool for their organization only. Making sure the website presents a professional image is an important consideration for Nina’s team. She would also like to keep events posted even after they have passed, as new visitors to their site are often people searching for terms used in their descriptions of past events. Nina has no experience with programming, and her webmaster maintains the Center’s website. The calendar is very basic, consisting only of a list of events.

Nina would be interested in a new calendaring system if it would be easy for their members and visitors to use and would enhance their reputation by presenting an even more professional image. She would also like to maintain the current system of sending out an email to their mailing list whenever a new event is added, and ensure that she is able to modify events on their website at a moment’s notice, as locations are sometimes changed right before their events. Nina would love to be able to include links for their users to create maps to their events, as they often hold events off-campus. She favors the current list format of their calendar, and does not currently use a personal calendaring system, although she has used a PDA in the past.

Nina's Goals:

• Create a web-based calendar which will showcase only the events that occur in her department
• Present a professional image that will encourage potential speakers and contributors to work with their organization
• Manage the sometimes heated political climate that surrounds their speakers, including making sure two speakers who have opposing political views are not featured together on their website
• Drive traffic to their website by keeping past events listed there
• Send email to mailing list when a new event is added
• Modify events on a moment’s notice
• Allow users to easily create maps to their events

Task Analysis