OK, I admit it: I'm fiercely proud of Meet-O-Matic (www.meetomatic.com), the no-brainer (and, alas, no-features therefore, no 'fancy frills') meeting scheduler that my colleague Stuart Watt and I designed, and which now seems to have climbed consistently into the top two or three search results for the pair of words meeting scheduler on both Google and MSN.

By "no-features no fancy frills" I mean that Stuart and I have resisted all suggestions by well-meaning users to add things such as PDA synchronization, hourly-scheduling, etc., which many of the power tools already do nicely, but which don't fit the target we were aiming at. Moreover, our own experience with the power tools suggests that they are extremely frustrating and difficult for the average user. Our target was those possibly-rare but mission-critical events involving large teams when all you care about is the date (or maybe AM/PM), and simply being able to see at a glance who can make it when.

And of course we wanted it to be a 'go-to-the-damn-site-and-use-it-NOW' type of thing, with no registration, no fees, no nothin'. So that's what we did.

The design process, which is what I want to write about here, led us through a series of false starts and fancy features that we eventually abandoned, slowly uncovering what seemed to us to be six useful principles underlying the creation of good diary/meeting management software. These may seem ridiculously obvious, but judging from the large number of software tools that do not follow these principles, I suppose that they are not obvious at all! The description of these principles appears elsewhere, but as it's our own wording I think it's appropriate to describe it verbatim in the six bullet points below.

Meeting scheduler design principles:

• Autonomy: People often prefer to 'do their own thing' (e.g. arrange circumstances to attend or avoid a specific meeting), rather than delegating responsibility to another person or a software tool.


• Different tools: You cannot count on everyone you intend to invite to a meeting to use the same single diary/meeting software, or even software that 'interoperates' (communicates seamlessly) with your own.


• Least common denominator: You can, however, safely assume that the overwhelming majority of people you want to invite probably have access to Internet email and a web browser.


• Familiarity: People like to work with software tools they already know.


• Speed: People will often pick up the phone or send a conventional email rather than wait for a new software tool to help them, even if that tool looks innovative and promising. Reason? The old tried-and-tested methods feel faster!


• Granularity: For meetings that involve many possible dates or many people, the real problem is homing in on dates or AM/PM slots at a coarse-grained level in order to obtain a first-pass solution, rather than fussing about the precise time. In fact, a first-pass solution to a very complex scheduling problem provides such a large immediate payoff that it guarantees reuse of meeting scheduler software, even if only a few times per year. It also encourages a simple and speedy user interaction.

Fine-grained scheduling is of couse an important niche, and there are a vast number of excellent tools that deal with this -- it's just not the niche that we found personally challenging, hence the development of Meetomatic.

Since writing those six principles, observation of users makes me appreciate that 'delegation' is in fact a very tricky issue. I recall that when I wrote that analysis of "Eight years of email stats" here a few weeks ago, some users wrote in saying, "Dude, get a secretary!". Anecdotally, we know that a lot of secretaries spend a lot of time chasing diary entries for the purpose of arranging meetings or events, and in fact it is precisely among secretaries that we've had the most enthusiastic response. So I suppose that even without the 'autonomy' issue (which was really meant to criticize 'intelligent agent' solutions that people may not trust with their diary arrangements), the other five points still stand for the large category of meetings and events that motivated us in the first place. I'd be interested to hear what readers think about this.

[Footnote: Is this posting itself an 'ad' for Meetomatic? I don't know. In one sense it must be, but I figure that since Meetomatic always was and always will be free, and even though there are now a few Google adsense ads on the site to help defer the cost of the hosting service, and since I'm genuinely interested in the design issues, and my role in Meetomatic is pretty self-evident right from the opening sentence, that it's OK! I hate these meta-discussions anyway, but thought I ought to raise it.]