...
Jeff the Undergrad
Jeff is a 3rd year undergrad student in the EECS department. He attends classes, lectures, recitations and often needs to meet with Professors, friends, and other groups for various meetings. His primary method for getting contact information is through Facebook or faculty members personal pages. His primary method of contacting others is through online messaging (e-mail, Facebook, google+, etc.) or text messaging. He doesn't like the current MIT directory page as it doesn't allow for filtering. Unfortunately, these electronic methods of communication are not always sufficiently fast and it may be difficult to find contact information through personal pages and directories.
Lessons learned from the Undergrad
There are many indirect methods of contacting people, which can be time consuming. This is problematic in urgent situations.
Current directories give no information on personal interests, this option with a filter would promote interest/hobby based communications.
Jermie the 2nd year Grad Student
Jermie is a 2nd year Graduate student in Chemistry Department. He is done with his Qualification Exam, but he still takes some classes and attends lectures and recitations. He is also TA for a Grad Course. He has a huge research group with multiple sub groups in it. In his research group they have a weekly meeting for the entire group and also many small ones where sub groups meets the adviser to give status reports. Because his adviser is a busy person therefore she has shared her number with all the group members and they give her a call in case urgent discussion is required while she is not around.
...