CMU School of Drama


Thursday, July 31, 2014

This Could Be The Last Calendar App You Ever Install

⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community: A behavioral scientist, artificial intelligence professor, and Stanford PhD candidate in machine learning walk into an office. The result, strangely enough, is yet a to-do and calendar app. But it's no joke.
These three smart, uniquely qualified people--noted economist Dan Ariely, professor Yoav Shoham, and CEO Jacob Bank--aren’t in love with to-do apps. But with their app Timeful, they’re trying to solve an acutely modern human problem using the types of tools people are already used to.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

In our all program meeting, the program leaders showed us the video clip of Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture. One thing that often came up was the concept of a "head fake": the act of making someone think they're learning something, when in actuality they're learning something completely different. I think this app is a great example of utilizing this method. A time management app could benefit anybody, but nobody would want to go out to buy one. By marketing it as a calendar app, it not only appears much more attractive to customers but also gives them the illusion of control. If you let a user think they're organizing their own lives, they will be much more receptive to the help of the app.

In the end, people don't know what they need and through development of this app, the world will become a much better managed place.