Managing Intimacy Using Online Calendar Systems Alexander Thayer Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 huevos@uw.edu Matthew J. Bietz Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 mbietz@uw.edu Charlotte P. Lee Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 cplee@uw.edu ABSTRACT People who use online calendar systems such as Google Calendar invest a significant amount of effort into managing their relationships with friends, family, and significant others. Our study participants spent a considerable amount of time managing the levels of intimacy in their relationships around and with calendars, and in conjunction with a great deal of talk and action. Our findings show that while people use online calendars for life scheduling, they also use their calendars as part of their overall approach to increasing, maintaining, and decreasing levels of intimacy with other people. This poster explains how, why, and under what circumstances people engaged in these intimacy management behaviors in the context of their online calendars, and why designers and developers should be concerned with these behaviors as they create the next generation of calendaring tools. Author Keywords Calendars, intimacy, groupware, relationship work. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – Collaborative computing; computer-supported cooperative work. General Terms Design, Human Factors, Theory INTRODUCTION People use online calendar systems for many reasons, including relationship management activities such as controlling feelings of intimacy with friends, family, and significant others. These activities require serious, rather than casual [3], work on the part of the users. Early studies of online calendar systems are situated in professional environments [6]; the most recent studies [see, for example, 2, 4, 5] focus on how families with children coordinate their time across personal and professional calendars, a process known as life scheduling [2]. Our study investigates how, why, and under what circumstances people engage in intimacy management behaviors in the context of their online calendars. The population for our study focuses primarily on people with significant others but without children. We conducted 30 interviews with 20 women and 10 men who actively use Google Calendar and who share at least 1 of their calendars with at least 1 other person. Of the 30 participants, 27 did not have children at the time of the study. A research team interviewed participants using a standard interview protocol developed after a set of 5 pilot interviews. Participants completed a demographic survey before participating in semi-structured interviews about their usage practices with regard to the calendars they managed and shared with others, and that were shared with them. All names in this paper are pseudonyms. UNDERSTANDING FRIENDSHIP AND INTIMACY DEVELOPMENT Fehr [1] provides a useful model of the process of developing new relationships and managing levels of intimacy within relationships. People often make new friends because they live or work in close proximity, or because they are introduced through their existing social networks. They evaluate potential friends on the basis of several criteria, including perceptions of physical attractiveness, social skills, responsiveness, shyness, and similarity. They also consider situational elements, such as expectations of future interaction, levels of exposure and availability, and the perceived capacity to positively affect their lives. Finally, when two people begin the path to friendship, they mutually determine whether they like each other and want to engage in reciprocal self-disclosure. People develop feelings of intimacy when they mutually confide emotional or personal information (rather than purely factual or descriptive information). In addition, there are at least four other factors that determine whether two people will generate stronger feelings of intimacy: availability, probability of future interaction, frequency of exposure, and responsiveness [1]. Online calendar users rely on their calendars partly to manage these factors: They determine other people’s availability, verify how long or how often they can meet with another person, and invite people to a specific event with the expectation that they will Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CSCW 2010, February 6–10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. ACM 978-1-60558-795-0/10/02. 483