GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis

Who We Are

• Tara Krishnan
• Carlo Biedenharn
• Evan Moore

The Problem We're Solving

• College tourists often have trouble finding events/activities to participate in or visiting popular areas/picture spots on the day they visit in the surrounding area.
• College tourists may not have access to current students in the university for inquiries regarding more specific aspects of life at the university.
• Tour Guides have to spend time repeatedly answering common questions from tourists which detracts time from the tour.
• Tour Guides forget interesting questions they were asked during longer tours

User Analysis

Tour Guides

The tour guide would like more feedback from the tourists. They feel like things would go more smoothly if tourists asked more questions, rather than just having to go straight through their own script. More feedback would allow more talking points for the guide as they go through the tour, rather than their having to fill up the empty time. For large groups, guides would like to ensure that everyone's questions and needs are met, especially those in the back of the group. They would also like to be able to facilitate ways of providing answers to tourists' questions that they do not know the answer to (e.g. refer them to someone else, how they can find out the information, etc.)

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• Receive more feedback from the tourists
• Encourage/facilitate more questions from tourists
• Have ways to facilitate tourists getting answers to questions they themselves may not know the answer to

Tourists

We define tourists as those who visit colleges and attend a college tour.

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• See more of the campus and college architecture
• Visit some of the college's libraries

Tourist Office

The tourist office currently matches a tour guide to a tour group as first come, first serve. They would be interested in providing better matches and a method or organizing which tour guide gets which tours. They would also be interested in efficient methods of keeping track of the feedback they receive from tour guides and tourists.

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• Better methods of matching and organizing tour guides to tour groups. 
• Efficient methods of tracking the feedback and information they receive from tourists and guides. 

Going Forward

Our future task analysis and approach to the project from here on out will more than likely focus less more on the academic story tourist group and general visitor group, and more on other user groupsthe tourist guides. The goals/interests of both these user groups are the least aligned with our own personal interests. The academic tourist group's goals/needs may be to similar to our own interests. The general visitor's goals/needs either cannot be solved by a UI or else can be addressed if we focus our attention on the goals/needs of other user groups. The parent tourist group's interests either overlapped with the story tourists or academic tourists, or were entirely dependent on whether their child's needs were met (which is hard to achieve through a UI unless the child is in the story tourist group). We also felt as though the story tourist's needs are the least met during college visits/tours, and would be the most interesting to tackle through the UI. Regarding the tourist office and story tourists pair versus the tourist guide and story tourists pair, we felt as though the needs of the tourist guide were most compatible with the needs of the story tourist, and that the collective problem of tacking both their needs through a UI would be fun to take on.