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There are several types of users who will use our product. To detail each persona, we interviewed people from each user group:
- Jason the Engineer... the Grad Student
- Laura Donald the Project ManagerProfessor
- ... the HR ManagerUndergrad Student
Jason the Engineer
Jason wants to find the colleagues he works with daily. They are sometimes away from their desks at meetings or in break rooms. During those instances, Jason must spend time searching for them around the office, sometimes without success. Jason wants an efficient way to connect with his colleagues in a non-intrusive way. He prefers to be able to set his own privacy settings in the app, so that he has "quiet time" to think through his work. On the other hand, Jason is open to spontaneous meetings with coworkers who share similar work or personal interests. Jason would love to meet new coworkers around the office, especially if they are working on similar projects.
Lessons learned from the Engineer/Front-line Office Worker
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Vincent the
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Professor
Laura Vincent wants his project team research group to interact with each other by sharing ideas and receiving feedback. He wants to see how frequently his team group members are meeting with each other, and receive notices if one member of his team is working in isolation. Laura recognizes that his team's success depends on getting "buy-in" from marketing, finance, and other groups in the company. Furthermore, his team can improve their technical solution by learning from other engineering teams. As a result, Laura would love for the app to automatically connect his team members with other groups with similar interests. Of course, he want with other research groups. Vincent sometimes comes across interesting research presentations and articles, so he wants to be able to easily forward this information to his students. He also wants his students' daily schedules to be easily accessible to his administrator, so that she can schedule meetings for his research group. Vincent often meets with people from visiting universities and companies, so he also wants the tool to help him find and locate people outside of MIT. Of course, Vincent wants the tool to be efficient, so that his team group can still concentrate on finishing project research work.
Lessons learned from the
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Professor
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- Overseeing students' research activities can be time-consuming. The app can help facilitate communication with his research group and between members in the research group.
- The app will be even more useful if it includes people from outside MIT.
Task Analysis
The main tasks performed using our product include:
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- Select a group, such as your project team, friends, or department.
- View the strength of connections between members in the selected group.
- View the people (outside the group) who have strong connections with members inside the selected group.
- Select a person and view their profile and major connections.
Alternative Use Case 1: Search for a person and be introduced to that person via a mutual connection.Alternative Use Case 2: Identify people in a group who are most disconnected (useful for managers to size up weak points in team interactions).