GR1 Analysis

Table of Contents

User Analysis

At a high level, our user population can be categorized into students or instructors (e.g., TAs). However, since different kinds of students will use the application differently, students are broken down into two subcategories: more active (or "organized") students, and more passive (or "lazy") students. For the user analysis, we have interviewed one of each type of users:

• Olivia, the Organized Student
• Levi, the Lazy Student
• Tina, the TA

Olivia, the Organized Student

Olivia is super organized. After the first day of classes, she goes and enters every pset, test and project milestone into her Google calendar. This not only helps her remember assignments in the future, but gives her a nice overview of everything she had to do during the semester and when she will have crunch weeks. The data entry takes her ~30 minutes, and she often gets frustrated at Google calendar for mis-interpreting MIT class numbers as times. She used calendars collaboratively for one project class a few years ago, but her group just used the calendars for events and left the task organization to email and in-person conversations.

She would use a collaborative scheduling tool, but wouldn't want anyone else to edit her information (she's fine with subscription).

Lessons learned from Olivia:

• There are students who would go in on the first day of class and add everything they need
  • However, they might repeat effort: Olivia would want to do it herself
• Google calendar isn't used for dynamic, group scheduling.
• Google calendar is annoying to enter non-repeating events on (ie bulk adders are really nice)
• Efficient entry is necessary to attract this class of users

Levi, the Lazy Student

Levi dislikes unnecessary work. He occasionally uses a small to-do list, but mostly prefers to keep track of his assignments in his head. To check his class assignments he visits the course website for each class, checks his email for announcements, and talks with other students in the class. He would like a tool to help keep track of his assignments, but would be reluctant to spend time adding assignments himself. Whether or not he would use certain features, like rating assignments, largely depends on how easy they are to access and use. However, he thinks it would be interesting if an assignment tracking tool also allowed him to see when friends had completed assignments.

Additionally, Levi would like a tool that integrates with services that he already uses, such as Google Calendar.

Lessons learned from Levi:

• Many users will only consider using this kind of tool once it has enough users to ensure assignments will be added.
• Whether or not some features get used will depend on how they're presented to users.
• Social features and gamification may attract additional users.
• It it probably better to integrate with alternative services instead of competing with them.

Tina, the TA

Tina has been a TA for two years, and she currently uses a number of websites and online tools to communicate with her students. She is not satisfied with the current way of entering this information (which sometimes involves editing HTML files on her computer and uploading them using FTP). As a student, she uses Google Calendar to organize her assignments. At the beginning of a term, she schedules all her test dates in a personal calendar. As a TA, one of her concerns is getting the word out when a change is made to an assignment. Tina believes that a collaborative organizer would benefit her more as a student than as a TA, but she also thinks that such tool should support the specific needs of TAs and instructors. She is particularly interested in collecting assignments statistics, such as difficulty and time to completion. She believes the collaborative nature of the tool would not make it less reliable, especially if moderated by the TAs.

Lessons learned from Tina:

• TAs could have the role of moderators
• Changes in assignments are a real-world problem
• TAs and instructors could use the tool to collect statistical information

Task Analysis

The problem analysis and user interviews revealed several high-level tasks performed by our users. Some of the tasks to be supported by the application include:

• Creating a Class Feed
• Subscribing to a Class Feed
• Creating an Assignment
• Completing an Assignment

Creating & populating a Class Feed

• Goal: Enter a new class, with its assignments, into the system
• Frequency of use: At the beginning of a semester, once per class
• Subtasks:
  • Create the new class
  • Add one or more assignments
• Preconditions:
  • A descriptive name for the new class feed
  • A list of assignments with due dates

Subscribing to a Class Feed

• Goal: Subscribe to the feed for a class, so its assignments will show up on your due list
• Frequency of use: At the beginning of a semester, once per class
• Subtasks:
  • Find the desired class in the list of class feeds
  • Find an official (ie TA-made) feed, if it exists
• Preconditions: 
  • Knowing the class name

Creating an Assignment

• Goal: Add an assignment, either to a class feed, where it will be visible to all students, or to a private feed, visible only to you
• Frequency of use: Varied: anywhere from once per assignment to never.
• Subtasks:
  • Choose the feed to add the assignment to
  • Add assignment details
• Preconditions:
  • A due date for the assignment

Completing an Assignment

• Goal: Mark an assignment as done, so that it does not appear in the due list
• Frequency of use: Up to once per assignment (several times a week)
• Subtasks:
  • Mark the assignment as done
  • Fill in assignment statistics (optional) 
• Preconditions:
  • A completed assignment