A digital family calendar in the home: lessons from field trials of LINC

Digital family calendars have the potential to help families coordinate, yet they must be designed to easily fit within existing routines or they will simply not be used. To understand the critical factors affecting digital family calendar design, we extended LINC, an inkable family calendar to include ubiquitous access, and then conducted a month-long field study with four families. Adoption and use of LINC during the study demonstrated that LINC successfully supported the families’ existing calendaring routines without disrupting existing successful social practices. Families also valued the additional features enabled by LINC. For example, several primary schedulers felt that ubiquitous access positively increased involvement by additional family members in the calendaring routine. The field trials also revealed some unexpected findings, including the importance of mobility—both within and outside the home—for the Tablet PC running LINC.