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- - Tim the 1st Year Grad Student (Age 26)
- - Abigail the Professor (Age Around 50-55)- Jeff the 3rd Year Undergrad Student (Age 20)
- - Jermie the 2nd Year Grad Student (Age 25)
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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 MIT directory to find a 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 current location .
- There is no clear way to find people with similar interests.
2:
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Abigail is a Professor and has a research group of 15 students with sub-groups for various projects. She wants her research sub-group to interact with each other by having discussions and sharing ideas. She would like to see which students are working together on a project and who they are collaborating with across the departments or research groups. She also finds it useful to have a summary of seating plan to see how the sub-teams are spread out across the office space. This will be particularly helpful while planning relocation so that people working in the same group can be located in proximity.
She sometimes comes across interesting research presentations and seminars on last minute, so she wants to be able to easily invite her students to these events. She also wants her students' daily schedules to be accessible to her administrative secretary, so that she can schedule meetings for her research group.
Lessons learned
- 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.
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Jeff the 3rd Year Undergraduate Student
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
- 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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3: Jermie the 2nd Year Graduate 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 meet the adviser to give status reports. Because his adviser is a busy person, 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.
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
- People who have been part of MIT for a long enough use "work-arounds" to arrange meetings or to discover new people. They have grown to accept these "work-arounds."
- By offering a convenient solution packaged in one easy-to-use UI, people will find new features they wish they had or thought they were missing.
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