GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis

User Analysis

We have two classes of users: parents and their children.  While it will be possible for anyone who needs to easily check in with someone else to use our system, we will focus on these two user groups.

Characteristics

Parent characteristics:

• Ages: any parent age
• Education: Literate
• Language: English
• Technological experience: Low to Medium - owns a computer and/or smartphone and can use websites on either
• Motivation: wants to be informed about children’s safety and/or activities
• Attitude: High - safety of children is something that is a #1 priority

Child characteristics:

• Ages: 11 (whenever they are old enough for a smartphone) through 22 (college-aged), with application focus on high schoolers
• Education: Literate
• Language: English
• Technological experience: High - owns and can easily use a smartphone
• Motivation: Have parents be satisfied with information about their activities
• Attitude: Varies, probably Medium - may not consider parents’ motivation important or have high desire to use application in depth

Personas

Parent: Marge
Marge is a hard-working mom who cares a lot about her children. She wants them to be safe, but she also wants them to have fun. Right now, her children are in that difficult stage where they are trying to declare independence, but are dependent on their parents for at least a few more years. One of the side-effects of this stage is that her children have stopped seeing her as “cool”, and try to reduce the amount of communication between them. Whenever Bart is out, she wants to make sure that he’s safe, since he’s able to drive now and he’s already been in a couple of accidents, and if he’s ever in trouble or needs help, that he won’t hesitate to ask. But, whenever she tries to call him now, he simply ignores her calls. She even learned how to text, but that was to no avail -- he won’t answer her texts unless it involves something he wants. Lisa is slightly easier to deal with, but Marge still feels that tension between them every time she checks up with her while she’s out. She wants to know that they are safe, but she doesn’t want to annoy them.

Children: Lisa and Bart
Lisa is a conscientious fourteen year old who doesn’t want her parents to worry about her, but has a really busy, active after-school schedule, and doesn’t always have time to stop what she’s doing and call them. She is fine with letting Marge know where she is, what she is doing, and who she’s with (though Marge doesn’t care about knowing this, she knows Lisa wouldn’t be doing anything wrong), but doesn’t want to have to leave her club meetings to make a private call. She is also forgetful, having so many things to do, and often won’t check in with her parents unless reminded. Sometimes her activities run late and she misses her bus, so she needs a ride home.

Bart is a seventeen year old who has recently gotten his driver’s license and stays out late partying and drinking with his friends. He would never call Marge in front of his friends, and doesn’t think that what he’s doing is any cause for concern; he’s never gone to the hospital, but he has smashed his car a few times (he was fine in both cases). He is really annoyed by what he sees as constant nagging from Marge, and he thinks that she’s going over the top by checking up with him so often. He wants to have fun with his friends, not talk to his mom, since that’s not cool. He wants to do as little as possible to make his mom not ground him.

Interview Results

Several feature requests were made during the interviews. Some parents with more difficult children like the Bart persona above would like automatic tracking, but children would most likely never go for that. For younger children, this may be ok. Some parents want to be able to set the reminder frequency for a check-in, or be able to instantaneously send a check-in request.

Parents also want to be able to know exactly when a response has come in. Parents would also like a “help message” (e.g. pick me up, I’m not okay, call me) that the children could send to the parents, which would send a phone call with a pre-recorded message asking them to check their CheckIn app (however, we would hope that the kid would call the police if he or she were in a real emergency).

Parents also want the option to get more information from their children. Parents would like to know things such as who the child is with, what the child is doing, and about when the the child will be home. To that effect, parents would like the option to create a form to send to the child so the child can answer these things.

A teenager we interviewed would like a very fast interface, and the option to ignore all optional information that their parents might want but don’t need.  However they would like space to be able to give a reason for not calling or checking in as well.  Ideally they would also like to be able to check in later, though this conflicts with the parent’s ideal.  If both their parents had the application, they would like the opportunity to check in with just one of them.

Task Analysis

Parents and children will have different tasks to perform in dealing with this problem.

Parent Tasks
Parents want their children to check in with them, without having to call them.  To get their children to do this, they must:

• Ask their child to check in

In fact, parents often want their children to check in on a regular basis, for example, every day after school, or every Friday and Saturday night by 11pm.  They would also want to be able to ask their child to check in and then not think about it for awhile - e.g. tell the child every time they want a check in for all of tomorrow.  Therefore this task of asking their child to check in would be related to another task that they would want to be able to do:

• Set future and/or regular check-in times for their children

If parents have to compromise with their children to agree to not do this via a phone call, they want to make sure they still get enough information from their children, e.g. who their child is with.  Therefore another task they need to do is:* Request specific information from their child upon check-in

Once the child checks in, the parent needs a way to obtain the check-in information.  Therefore another task for them is:* View check-in (and maybe old check-ins) (though this does not need to be a “viewing” action necessarily)

Child Tasks
Children need to answer their parents every time their parents want information from them.  Therefore the child’s main task is:* Respond to a parent’s request for check-in

Children might also need help but still not want to call their parents.  For this, they would have to ask:* Request parent’s help, or a phone call from the parent, without having to call their parents

TA Feedback.

As we discussed, I think you guys are on to something really cool. There are some issues with your GR1 that need work before moving forward, however.

The first thing is that instead of stating a problem, you share your solution, though you provide a bit of motivation for it. Think of it first as a problem to be solved.

You also don't seem to really get a good feel for what the tasks your users use to solve your problems, and instead you describe actions that your app will let users take. Don't forget that the next step is to make three separate designs - you shouldn't already have picked one. Think of task analysis as the analysis of tasks that need to be done to solve the problems.

I'd appreciate it if you made these changes, since we'll be working off this document for the whole rest of the project.