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The following are three possible scenarios for our tasks.
Scenario 1
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Amy would like to make an event for her upcoming 21st birthday bash. She has rented out the VIP lounge at Estate and would like it to be the best birthday ever. As such, she needs many cool MIT students to come, and so she would like to publicize the event as much as possible. Since everyone at MIT has a Beaver Buzz account, she decided that she’d post an event on Beaver Buzz. She logs into her account, which she has made previously. She then selects to create a new event. She is prompted for a time and a date for the event. She enters that it will begin at 10:00 PM, and that it will take place 6/12/2011. In addition, she fills out an optional event textbox describing her event as the “event of the millennium.” After posting, she goes to check the event schedule and sees that it has been added. Satisfied, Amy logs off.
Scenario 2:
Pepe wants to try out Beaver Buzz to better his social life. After visiting and looking at the different features of the website, he decided to join to gain posting capabilities and comment on posts made by other users. To join, the service checks his MIT certificate (to make sure he is a student) and then asks him to input a user name and a password.
Once the sign in process is completed, Pepe goes to the homepage and looks for the coolest events on campus in the “What’s Hot?!” section. He then notices that there is a huge party the upcoming Friday. He goes to the event page and notices that there is a 200 message thread about the awesomeness that is going down on Friday. He then adds the party for his weekend “to do” list. Pepe logs off feeling that his social life is taking a turn for the better.
Designs:
Design #1:
Beaver Buzz home page. If the user visiting the page is new, he can sign in by clicking on the sign in button. Old users can input their user names and passwords in the supplied boxes. The homepage also has a search bar which allows users to search for topics, user posts, etc. The main feature of the homepage is the "What's Hot?!" section which is a scroll bar interface which displays the most commented Events and Posts.
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After reading the new interesting posts, Terry decides that he wants to be able to see discussions from more topics. He clicks the add topic button and selects a topic to add to his Recent tab. Terry clicks on the My Posts tab to see if anyone has responded to any of his comments.
Terry wants to post an interesting article about MIT sports that he found online. He clicks on the new post link and enters the information for the article. He pastes the link in the description text field for people to follow to the article. He tags the article in the sports topic and posts it.
Design #3:
This design was meant to be slightly more consistent with other article-sharing websites on the web, such as Digg.com and Reddit.com. In particular, we treat discussions, articles, and events very similarly. However, we did want to make the interface simpler. Thus, there is only two types of actual pages. The first is the “View Topic” mode, which contains links to articles, events, and discussions. These are ordered by most-recently posted. The only exception is the “What’s Hot” topic, which is ordered by how many people have liked the topic. Users may navigate through topics, view the posts, and like/dislike the posts. The other type of page is the “Discussion” mode. Every Article, Event, and Discussion has this mode, and it is where users may discuss the current post. A user may either post a new comment, reply to another comment, or delete one of their old comments.
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