Task Review

Search Events based on Personal Preferences

• Ellie is a middle school student that loves working with kids and aspires to be a teacher. She also has an instagram dedicated to cute dogs and food. She really wants to know about all the events that fall within her interests happening around and in her community. She would love to go to the puppy parade or a new cafe opening, but she doesn’t care at all for sports or what the cinema will be showing next week. She also wants to volunteer at an elementary school but has no idea when or how she could do that, especially because she can’t drive. When she tries to look up events happening around her, she gets way too many events that don’t interest her and ends up missing the ones that do. She sets her activity recommendations to be restricted to local events involving things that she is interested in (kids, dogs, food) and are happening when she is free, usually in the afternoon. Her personalized event list shows her that there is an elementary school a bikeable distance away looking for after school volunteers. She takes an interest in this event and signs up to go next week.

• This is a new task, as most event sharing platforms show every event available (think Daily Messages) or things that your friends have said they are interested in (FaceBook) instead of being sorted to show only things you are interested in. This task will be moderately difficult. We would need to have an accurate tagging system for events and have an efficient method to search for events that fit a user’s preferences. We also need a systematic way for people to set their interests, availability, and restrictions.

Easily Access Detailed Information

• Robin is a young adult working in retail and taking night classes to prepare for a career change. Music is their way of unwinding after a long day of dealing with customers and finishing schoolwork. They see that there are two upcoming music events that look interesting and could fit their schedule, but they only have time to go to one because they are behind on work. Robin looks at their descriptions and sees that one concert features Hilary Hahn and the other features Tigran Hamasyan. Unfortunately, they don’t know who either of these people are. They search for more info on both artists and find that Hahn specializes in contemporary violin while Hamasyan specializes in jazz piano. Robin thinks the jazz will energize them, so they decide to attend the concert featuring Hamasyan.

• This is an existing task. People can google things on their own and some platforms give an option for the user to “explore” a term by opening up a small window with the selected term searched (Google Docs does this). It should be easy to implement by sending the user a Google search page with their term of confusion.

Publicize Events for Others to See

• Henry is a local artist living in a neighborhood area of a college town. He makes a lot of artworks, especially comic design. As Henry paints in his studio mostly by himself, he gets bored sometimes. Thus, he comes up with an idea to organize weekly art classes. Especially, he wants to invite students from the college over to help him with his paintings, give critique, and learn some art skills at the same time. Unfortunately, since he is unaffiliated with the college, he cannot post his event there, and giving out posters alone is not enough to get students’ attention. Instead, he posts his event, with detailed description of his work, the time commitment each week, and the type of students he is looking for. The art lovers at the college can now see his added event through their calendar, as art is added as one of their “interested” events, and can now sign up to join his classes.

• This is an existing task. However, currently everything is added through communications, especially social platforms, so events are much more publicized and can be hard to be targeted at the true audience. Individual and small groups are usually not able to post on their own. Since this is an existing task, it is conceptually easy.

Share Events with Friends

• Sarah’s old father, Steve, is very unfamiliar with today’s technology. He has a phone, yet he barely downloads any apps or uses any new features. He only uses his phone to call Sarah and text her when she doesn’t pick up. Sarah knows that her father loves classical music and that this week there will be an interesting classical music event going on close to their house. However, since her father is unfamiliar with technology, he cannot get access to the information about the music event. So Sarah decides to share that event to her dad by adding his email address and phone number as the receiver. All Steve has to do is check his text messages, and he sees a pdf of the event page that Sarah sent him. It is easy for him to open this attachment in his messages, and he’s happy that he doesn’t have to navigate through a website or download an app himself. He sends a quick reply to Sarah saying “Yes”, and she adds it to her calendar.

• This is an existing task. However, currently everything is added through communications, especially social platforms, so events are much more publicized and can be hard to be targeted at the true audience. Individual and small groups are usually not able to post on their own. Since this is an existing task, it is conceptually easy.

Easily add Events to Personal Calendar

• Kait is busy local in a college town who loves learning. She knows the college hosts a lot of interesting speakers and would like to attend some of these lectures, but she often forgets to attend events that really interest her because she didn’t have a chance to add it to her calendar when she first learned about it. Easy calendar integration helps mitigate information overload and by only displaying the events Kait knows she wants to attend. She clicks a button and adds the event to her personal calendar, which she uses to structure her everyday life. Once the event is on her calendar, she can use all other calendar features, including reminders, travel time estimates, and sending invitations. This makes it so that even if she only has a quick moment to save something when she sees it, she can do it with no hassle.

• This is an already existing task, and thus should be an easier element to design: many platforms do a good job with easy calendar integration. However, since no other platform aggregates and presents information to the user in the same way (being primarily person- and event- focused), the secondary calendar integration does not advance the same goal that Clink! focuses on: to mitigate information overload by providing convenient access to pared-down, personalized event information. If there was no seamless way to save this information, the other work of our platform would be much less valuable.

Passively Receive Event Recommendations

• James is a busy college student with many interests. He lives in NYC, so there are always many events happening that he would like to attend– this makes it that even when he narrowly sorts events, there are still many things to look through. This proves especially difficult because James doesn’t always know when he will be available, or even if he is available, so he is easily frustrated when trying to quickly choose an event that meets his needs. A recommender feature helps to address this problem, as when James chooses to turn on recommendations, he gets notified of a very select few events happening near his current location, based on his interests. The recommendations only happen when he has a significant block of time marked as free on his calendar, when he would usually be awake and active. They are also based on information such as time availability, the past events he’s been interested in, how he’s rated the events he attended, and transportation time/ geographic proximity to the event.

• This is a new task, and we anticipate it will be one of our most difficult. It would be a very advanced technical feature, but the design will be conceptually difficult as well. We will need to balance how we weight different pieces of information, how we notify the user, with what frequency these notifications should sound (once a day for every free block of time? Only right before the free time, whenever it occurs?), as well as questions such as whether we stagger event start times and lengths, how much information a notification should give, what form should it take, and how the app should respond to a user clicking on the notification.