Space, Time, and Choice: A Unified Approach to Flexible Personal Scheduling

In the context of increasingly busy lives and mobility constraints, we present a unified space-time approach to support flexible personal scheduling. We distill an analysis of the design requirements of interactive space-time scheduling into a single coherent workflow where users can manipulate a rich vocabulary of spatio-temporal parameters, and plan/explore itineraries that satisfy or optimize the resulting space-time constraints. We demonstrate our approach using a proof-of-concept mobile application that enables exploration of the inter-connected continuum between task scheduling (temporal), and multi-destination route mapping (spatial). We evaluate the application with a user study involving an itinerary reproduction task and a free-form planning task. We also provide usage scenarios illustrating the potential of our approach in various contexts and tasks. Results suggest that our approach fills an important gap between route mapping and calendar scheduling, suggesting a new research direction in personal planning interface design.