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- ... the Undergrad Student
Jason the
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Graduate Student
Tim is a first year graduate student in the EECS department. He attends classes and lectures, and often has to meet with various Professors, TAs, Lab mates and friends for a variety of activities. He considers himself tech-savvy, but finds certain problems related to locating people and places within the campus annoying. For example, he needed to meet his Graduate Counselor to get an Add/Drop/Status Change form signed; and even though he had emailed, the counselor’s availability was a vague range (i.e. anytime before 5pm). He made several trips down on the same day and only managed to get what he needed after several tries.
Lessons learned from the Graduate Student
- To locate a stranger within the same institution, students have to resort to a multitude of resources in order to do so. (Google or directory for person’s office; whereis.mit to locate the physical location of the office. There is a need for a unified directory.
- There is no clear way to find out a person’s availability based on his/her location currently.
- There is no clear way to find people with similar interests currently.
(This will be changed to ...the Grad student - eyx)
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 Professor
Vincent wants his research group to interact with each other by sharing ideas and receiving feedback. He wants to see how frequently his group members are meeting with each other, and 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 group can still concentrate on finishing research work.
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Frequency of use: several times a day.
Enter user profile
Goal: To present a unified profile view that contains up-to-date information about each user.
Use Case:
- User wants to look for a person and does not have a centralized directory to do so.
- User wants to find information about the user which is up-to-date and filled-in
Preconditions:
- User has approved for a public directory listing.
- User has filled in his/her user profile either manually or automatically by granting the app permission to populate the information
Time constraints: None
Frequency of use: several times a day, depending on the users preference.
Spontaneous meeting
Goal: Get introduced to colleagues who share your similar personal and work interests.
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