ConnectUp | INFS1602 Assignment 2020

The Problem:
With the growing challenges COVID-19 imposes on the work-life balance of Australians, there is an increased demand for efficient tools to assist in the management of “work” and “personal” commitments. This prototype seeks to provide an innovative, feasible and effective solution to address the several impacts COVID-19 has on the individual and our society.

The Goal:
To create an innovative mobile application with the core goal of supporting Australians to manage their day-to-day commitments whilst maintaining social connections and personal wellbeing in social isolation.

The Solution:
ConnectUp, aims to help users manage work and personal commitments by integrating interdependent functions and features into a concise, one-stop shop. These functions catalyse several societal benefits and address key issues facing Australians, especially from COVID-19, as a management tool that puts an emphasis on human connection.
1) The Calendar Sync: Our sync function, in Figure 1, reconciles multiple calendar applications into a single holistic calendar, bettering users’ organisation and time management skills in all aspects of their lives. The sync function can link calendar applications from Google, Facebook and class timetables. After syncing ConnectUp displays one calendar in which users can add to, edit or colour code their schedules, allowing personalisation to suit their personal focus, interests and goals.
2) My Analytics: ConnectUp’s My Analytics feature, in Figure 2, encourages users to actively manage and reflect on their boundaries of work, class and personal time by tracking and displaying how much time a user is spending on their activities. By extracting information from the users’ ConnectUp calendar, My Analytics analyses the users’ productivity and proportion of time spent on each commitment for a chosen time period. Relative time spent on activities is visually represented through a pie chart and the number of events accepted or declined are also summarised.
3) Schedule Us: Schedule Us aims to encourage users to strengthen their interpersonal relationships through its optimised scheduling capabilities. As seen in Figure 3, this feature allows organisers to see attendees’ availability in order to find a common suitable time. Attendees can be selected from the organiser’s Facebook friend list or by phone number. Their availability can then be extracted without invasion of private data stored in the attendee’s ConnectUp calendar. This allows the organiser to accordingly adjust the start and duration of the event, before sending invitations.