Christine M. Kincaid
Abstract
Manufacturers of integrated electronic office systems have included electronic versions of the calendar in almost every system they offer. This paper describes a survey of office workers, carried out to examine their use both of paper calendars and of electronic calendars that are commercially available as part of integrated office systems. It assesses the degree to which electronic calendars meet the needs of users. Our survey shows that the simple paper calendar is a tool whose power and flexibility is matched by few, if any, of the current commercially available electronic calendars. Recommendations for features that should be included in electronic calendars and automatic schedulers are included.
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Index Terms
- Electronic calendars in the office: an assessment of user needs and current technology
Recommendations
Current issues in electronic mail: heralding a new era
AFIPS '83: Proceedings of the May 16-19, 1983, national computer conferenceElectronic mail is a quick, convenient, and low-cost way to handle people-to-people communications. Each form of electronic mail---computer message systems, communicating word processors, facsimile, and voice mail---is successfully serving organizations ...
Piloting electronic mail in today's office environment
SIGDOC '82: Proceedings of the 1st annual international conference on Systems documentationThis paper is a review of the experiences of the authors with electronic mail and is based upon their use of two different electronic mail systems. The first part of the paper contains a review of the attributes of the commercial systems currently ...
Reviews
Clarence A. Ellis
This paper presents some results of a survey of office workers to assess their attitudes toward and usage of electronic calendars. The conclusions presented are drawn from the 30 respondents, who were each interviewed and each a daily user of an office system containing an electronic calendar system. These conclusions are quite similar to previous ones [1]. They infer that current electronic calendar systems are mostly not used, and that most users prefer paper calendars. An exception to this is the use of the electronic system to schedule and reserve conference rooms and other shared resources. Many have stated that until the electronic calendar is as portable as the paper-based calendar book, it will simply not serve the majority of people. This critical point is totally missing from the authors' list (Section 5) of Recommendations for Electronic Calendaring Systems. The paper does present and explain many conferencing system functions and features. One potential problem with an assessment of this type is that it may measure users' perceived needs rather than actual needs. Finally, it appears that part of this assessment (Group One) suffers from the “threshold effect” in which the system's user interface is so bad that it is below the threshold of comfortable usage by anyone except a computer jock. This has occurred before with office systems, and it explains why Group One respondents were all negative. This can have the effect of totally overshadowing all other factors; perhaps the authors should repeat this experiment some time later when electronic calendars are in common use in integrated systems with high resolution displays, fast interaction, voice activation, and portability. Then it will be possible to measure calendar functionality rather than user interface interference level.:
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