GR1 - User and Task Analysis

User Analysis

Our Analyst’s Notebook (ANB) has an extremely wide range of users. The representative users that we interviewed are taken from from the sectors of academia (MIT), 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.

Industry: IBM is seeking an improved user interface for Analyst's Notebook, one that can compete with the more user-friendly Palantir software. Boingo needs to analyze data to build its new WiFi network in Africa, and needs a good way to visualize a combination of data sets across the continent. In general, it is important that analysts in industry can use data visualizations in reports to managers and higher-level executives.

Government: We will be collaborating with U.S. Army officers who use both Palantir and Analyst's Notebook for mission-critical decision making. One of the problems they face is the inefficiency of using two different tools, as their supporting databases are incompatible. They wish to use the superior computational tools of Analyst's Notebook, but also have an interface that can more clearly and efficiently visualize data trends.

Our representative users are from a civil affairs unit, rather than combat. They will be primarily concerned with promoting development and preventing conflict in third-world countries. They are trained to use the software before deployment, so they will have time to become expert users. Officers also analyze data to plan their missions. For soldiers deployed overseas under stressful and life-threatening conditions, efficiency is key.

Academia: Data analysis is an important part of research in many fields. In particular, research about international development in Africa has clear ties to the above mentioned users in industry and government. Our representative user from MIT is a graduate student working on development in Africa, who will use the interface we design to help advise our industry and government users.

and military (U.S. Army), but all were working on problems related to government and international development.

Within the scope of government-related users, we learned that ANB has two classes of users that use the program in very different ways:

1. Senior Analysts
   • Age: 30-40 years old
   • Experience: ~15 years, very highly experienced in their field and in using ANB
   • Education: most have Bachelor's degrees, many have at least one Master’s, some have PhD’s. Fields of study are mostly social sciences (i.e. sociology, anthropology, psychology). For those with two Master’s degrees, one of them is usually technical (i.e. engineering, math).
   • Usage: “use it like they’ve always used it.” Senior analysts are expert users of ANB and have become very familiar with it over the years, so they are not accustomed to changes in UI. They tend to prefer seeing relationships as text data fields or in tabular format, and frequently use queries to search within the data.

1. Entry-level government contractors or enlisted military
   • Age: early- to mid-20’s
   • Experience: not much experience with data analysis and ANB, if any
   • Education: recent college graduates. Bachelor’s degrees.
   • Usage: very visual. These users have a fast learning curve, and often rely on intuition to navigate the UI. Rather than see data as tables or text fields, they prefer to visualize relationships, i.e. as “honeycombs of influence” in a social network (people with influential relationships will be close to each other in a honeycomb visualization). Big emphasis on visualization of data and intuitive GUI.

Both of these user groups share the following characteristics:

• Frequency of use: daily. “They live it.”
• Hardware: high-end laptops with plenty of memory and processing power. Usually Dell Precision workstations.

The users emphasized that efficiency is the most important aspect of UI design for themOne 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 allows users to see relationships between large amounts of data efficiently. 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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