Improving Time Management in the PDA : A Design Suggestion

Abstract: Many of those who buy a PDA today do it for the purpose of time management. The PDA is meant to replace other artifacts like paper diaries and notebooks but in practice the PDA cannot be used as the sole resource for time management. We think that to succeed in making time management with a PDA more useful the design has to be grounded in an understanding of the existing technology and how it is used in practice. We achieved this understanding of the time management with a PDA by conducting an ethnographical study to find out how the PDA is used in practice, making a technical investigation of the PDA and cooperated with the PDA users throughout the design process. In this thesis we describe our design suggestion that improves the applications for time management in the PDA and take it a step closer to be the replacement for other time management artifacts that the users wanted.