GR1 - User and Task Analysis

User Analysis

Our representative users are taken from industry (Boingo, IBM), government (DOD), and academia (MIT). In general, users want an interface that is intuitive, interactive, and efficient. Users depend on data visualization to draw conclusions from complex data and make informed, time-sensitive decisions, so safety is an important usability aspect. Because users are generally experts with the software and depend on it for their day-to-day work, we may often choose efficiency over learnability when there is a tradeoff.

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One important design consideration is that different users want to see different levels of granularity in the data. For example, an Army major would want to see more technical details while a colonel may be more concerned with qualitative trends; similarly with an engineer versus a top executive in industry. In academia, researchers may want to look at data on many levels to draw connections between data trends.

Task Analysis

With the back-end and database support provided by IBM, we will focus on designing effective ways to visualize data in a way that is understandable to users. Standard data visualization tools are available from open-source libraries such as processing.js. We will select a few visualization methods (e.g. web, map, graph) to focus on, geared toward understanding the data sets for WiFi in Africa. Some high-level tasks include:

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