Supporting time-based coordination in everyday service interactions: the fluidtime system

ABSTRACT

The need for flexible and dynamic time management is becoming increasingly crucial in our society, especially where it concerns the coordination between individual and organizational time flows. The HCI community's prevailing approach to this issue focuses on personal time management or time-based coordination within teams and organizations. We follow a different angle, looking at the specific temporal relationship that connects individuals (customers) with service providers.In order to increase people's control over their time when they interact with services, we developed Fluidtime, a mobile phone based information system that provides users with continuous and ambient real-time information directly from the services they are seeking.The paper describes the Fluidtime system and provides case studies of its implementation. It presents insights from the trials and discusses both the design issues the project raises and new opportunities for using real time information.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
flexibility, mobile interactions, real-time, scheduling, time, ubiquitous computing, wireless