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B is a professional who has an administrative position in his organization. B has an iPad, a laptop, and several accessories for both. He is quite competent and rarely needs to ask for help with his computer. Unfortunately, B is better with hardware than keeping up with changing software. He has several habits, such as referring to his web browser as "Google" no matter which browser he's using, and doesn't understand why there are more than IE and Safari. When he learns a new application, he often struggles because he doesn't port over experience. B said that in the past, younger relatives have seen him using an application that they've never used and (to his amazement) told him how to use it when he was struggling. This was the most interesting part, since it showed that B has yet to develop an intuition for software despite years of work with computers. It also explained his reticence to try out new applications.
Person C
C is a middle school school student. She has an iPod touch, a laptop, and her favorite red headphones. She mostly uses the computer to play games, browse youtube, and type documents for school projects.She said she doesn't read the help/tutorial when playing a new game, and just clicks around instead. When asked what she thought of using powerpoint for school, she said that she had never needed to do so. When she doesn't know how to do something, or a website asks for a login (she said an "email") she asks her parents for help - she doesn't have her own email account.
The main takeaway from this interview came came from her mentioning an interest in making youtube videos, but never having done so because she didn't know how to.
User Classes
Completely Computer Illiterate
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These users can use the computer for what they need to do competently, but are still missing the ability to teach themselves new applications. They are better with computer vocabulary (ie "Taskbar") but nothing technical. They may have certain bad habits or fundamental misunderstandings, but for the most part it does not affect their ability to use the computer.
User Goals
From our interviews, we were able to identify several goals that our potential users have in mind. Since they aren't good with computers, users want straightforward site interaction, which means user accounts are optional and the interface is simple.
Since a major complaint was that tutorials for basic applications assumed basic familiarity with computers, beginner users would like to have a site that had more thorough explanations. Interviewed people said they would like an easy to access glossary of terms that they could refer to while reading lessons because that is a typical stumbling block for them.
They'd also like to be able to learn by skill sets, such as work-related, or fun and games, both so they could focus on certain skills and to learn more about what was available to them.
To summarize, users want to be able to learn about computers but not let technical terms trouble them, they want a website that is easy to use and offers coherent content, and they want to be able to make use of logical groupings to learn relevant information.