2 research outputs found
Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop
Although information workers may complain about meetings, they are an
essential part of their work life. Consequently, busy people spend a
significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a
system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows.
Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to
the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling
scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a
series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human
otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant who
executes them as unstructured macrotasks. We describe the iterative approach we
used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling
thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings
provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into
repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.Comment: 10 page