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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:
- - Tim the Grad Student (Age ?)
- - Donald the Professor (Age Around 45-50)
- - Jeff the 3rd Year Undergrad Student (Age 20?)
- - Jermie the 2nd Year Grad Student (Age 25)
1: Tim the 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.
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- 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.
2: 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. He also expressed usefulness in being able to view how the sub-teams are spread out across the office space, perhaps to facilitate people in the same group being located close to one another.
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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.
3: 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.
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- 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.
4: 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.
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