User preferences in calendar applications

The role of user experience research in the software development cycle has been largely overlooked in favor of emphasizing the more technical elements. However, understanding the user's perspective is just as important as the engineering aspects in creating a beneficial application. This thesis explored the value of user feedback via a survey designed for prospective users of the capstone project Timely. The results from the survey were compared against the assumptions that our capstone team made about what users would want from our app to reveal the disparity between engineer and user perspectives. Additionally, the responses were analyzed to determine how the Timely application could be modified to be more appealing to potential users. The survey provided a concrete example of how user feedback can be used in conjunction with the technological complexity to improve the software development process.