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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 1st Year 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.
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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 Student
- 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.
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Apart from his work he is interested in working out in gym and has a very social life. Also he happens to be a religious person and goes to church every weekend. He uses Gtalk and phone calls to arrange spontaneous hangouts. He bumps into people sharing his interests at church or other social gatherings that he likes to attend for this very reason. And for discovering new people in his organization MIT he uses MIT People Directory very often, and is very comfortable with it despite the difficult-to-use menus.
Lessons learned from the
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2nd Year Graduate Student
- People who are part of this organization for long enough have come up with different work around for situations such as arranging a meeting or discovering new people and have grown to accept them.
- If we offer them a more convenient solution packaged in one easy to use UI only then they will realize what they wish they had or thought they were missing.
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- View connections between colleagues
Search for a colleague
Goal: Find the location of a colleague.
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Sub Tasks:
- Enter a name in the "Search" text field for searching by name. OR
- Select a category you are interested from the "Search by" drop down. this drop down menu contains options: interest, department, personalized groups. and enter the name of that particular category for search.
- the search results will be displayed as a list with a thumbnail image of the person with each entry. Identify the person you are looking for and select it (by clicking or tapping on it's entry)
- View profile for the selected person.
- View the location for the selected person ("off campus" or a building number).
Preconditions:
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- Your colleague has a profile in the system.
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- Your colleague must "turn on" the app for you to find his location.
Time constraints:
Search must be quick. Info presented Information gathered must be concise.
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.
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