Family Ties

So much of the time, family life can be more even more complicated than work life! Recognizing this, HP came to us with the goal of creating a calendar to help organize busy families.

Acting as a control center for the whole family, the TouchSmart Calendar & Notes application serves as a place to coordinate schedules, write notes, record voice messages, and much more. In partnership with HP and Frog Design, we created the TouchSmart Calendar which accompanies HP’s TouchSmart PC, the first touch-screen computer designed specifically for the family.

Monsoon vs. the sticky note

We knew that our major competition wasn't the feature-rich calendar application designed for the workplace, but rather the old paper based method that most families use. Every step of the way, we asked ourselves: will this feature be so complicated that the user will revert to a post-it? If the answer was yes, then the whole team returned to the drawing board until we found an easier way.

To complicate matters, we were developing the TouchSmart Calendar for Microsoft Vista before the operating system had even been released. Working with Microsoft programmers, we ended up with industry-leading knowledge of WPF, XAML, and Vista OS.

Rave Reviews

The result was a product that impressed both the consumer and the uber-geeks at Microsoft. CNET raved, "It couldn't be simpler to use…We can easily imagine a busy family using TouchSmart Calendar as an organizational hub to keep track of various member's comings and goings." Mission accomplished.