GR1 - Task analysis

User analysis

We identify 3 main user classes for MyWeb and summarize their characteristics and needs using personas.

Persona 1.
Devicer is a 30 year old office worker who used to only have a computer in the office but he just bought an iMAC for his house and an iPhone. He has about 10 web pages that he often visits but doesn’t remember their URLs. On his old computer he probably bookmarked all of those web pages, or he can just type a few letters in the URL box and the browser history will get him the appropriate URL. However, with his new devices, he either has to do a Google search to find the websites he uses or try e-mailing himself the appropriate URLs from his old computer. Both ways are inconvenient and inefficient. Furthermore, he is now considering expanding his list of bookmarks, but realizes that it would be very tedious to sync across all of his devices. He wishes that there was one place on the Internet, such as myweb.mit.edu, where he could go and find all of his favorite web pages nicely organized and presented to him.

Persona 2.
Bookmarker is a college student who regularly uses many different sites including all her class related web pages, her social network related web pages, and her work related web pages, etc. Thus, she has more than 50 bookmarks on her browser. Since the bookmarks on the browser don’t provide much information about what website that bookmark corresponds to, she often confuses the bookmarks and ends up in a website that she did not intend to go to. Also, since she has that many bookmarks, not all of them can fit on the browser window, so it takes her a lot of time to go to her “other bookmarks” folder and find the bookmark she is looking for. She wishes that there was a web application that would allow her to efficiently add, delete, find, and access her bookmarks.

Persona 3.
Newb is 40 year old farmer who has been using the Internet for the past 6 months. He noticed that the count of websites that he uses on a regular basis has been increasing rapidly. Thus he is looking for a way to organize his websites in order to remember them all and if necessary search through them. He starts using the regular bookmark tool but he tends to forget which bookmark corresponds to which website thus he needs a visual representation(maybe a thumbnail) of the bookmark that would let him see some of the content of the website before accessing it. Also, since the bookmark tool on the browsers shows only a small button for each website, it is hard for him to aim for those buttons (new computer users are not proficient with the mouse).

Interviews

We conducted three interviews.

Interview 1:

Our first interviewee was Romain. He has a lot of devices: desktop computer, iMac, iPhone, athena etc. He has a lot of bookmarks and always finds it very tedious when he needs them for his work because he is very often working on a different machine from the one where he bookmarked the website. He sometimes solves that by carrying the flash memory with his bookmarks file. However, he usually feels like that defeats the purpose of making the access to the websites easier. He would love to have an online place where he can have all of his bookmarks. He researched the applications that would solve his problem, but did not find an adequate interface. He would like to have a visual representation of his bookmarks as oppose to highly textual one.

Interview 2:

Our second interviewee was Jovana Veselinovic. She is a college student that loves bookmarking websites that she visits. She literally bookmarks every website that she finds even moderately interesting. She usually does not visit them very often. As a consequence, Jovana very often confuses different websites that she previously bookmarked. She explained how she would love to have a feature that allows her to easily view the content of her bookmarks, before she navigates to them.

Interview 3:

Our final interviewee was Chanda. She is a 55 year old mother/homemaker. She speaks very little English, and uses the computer about three times a week. She only uses a few websites, namely GMail, Facebook, and online cookbooks. However, because she knows little English, the current bookmarks are useless to her because she can’t read the name of the links; her son has to help her find the website she needs to go to. She said she would be interested in a visual representation of her bookmarks that would enable her to identify the websites she needs to visit and gain independence from her son.

Task analysis

Create Account on MyWeb:

• frequency of task: on average only once, but could vary up to 5 in extreme cases
• preconditions: knowing the url for the web app, having an email account
• sign up**  provide a unique identifier (email) and password
  • confirm the email address 

Change my password:

• frequency of task: on average once a month, but could vary between a day and 5  years
• precondition: logged in
• change password:** provide the old password
  • enter a new one and confirm it

Get Access to MyWeb:

• frequency of task: daily access is the average
• precondition: know the url for the web app, remember email and/or password
• log in:
  • provide email and password
  • provide only email, go to email, and click the link for reset password

Interact with MyWeb:

• frequency of task: daily access is the average
• precondition: logged in
• view my favorite websites from any Internet access point:
  • decide on the website that I want to visit
  • search for the website 
  • navigate to the website
• add a new website to MyWeb 
  • provide the website url (through a text box or a plug-in)
• edit a website in MyWeb:
  • change the title
  • customize the view
  • delete
• share your bookmarks with others

• organize my websites 
  • make a category 
  • make a certain website belong to a category (like the labels in Gmail)
• view the current content of my favorite websites (via visual representation)
• see common/most popular websites

Domain analysis