GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis

User Analysis

We have two classes of users: parents and their children.  While it will be possible for anyone who needs to easily check in with someone else to use our system, we will focus on these two user groups.

Characteristics

Parent characteristics:

• Ages: any parent age
• Education: Literate
• Language: English
• Technological experience: Low to Medium - owns a computer and/or smartphone and can use websites on either
• Motivation: wants to be informed about children’s safety and/or activities
• Attitude: High - safety of children is something that is a #1 priority

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• Ages: 11 (whenever they are old enough for a smartphone) through 22 (college-aged), with application focus on high schoolers
• Education: Literate
• Language: English
• Technological experience: High - owns and can easily use a smartphone
• Motivation: Have parents be satisfied with information about their activities
• Attitude: Varies, probably Medium - may not consider parents’ motivation important or have high desire to use application in depth

Personas

Parent: Marge
Marge is a hard-working mom who cares a lot about her children. She wants them to be safe, but she also wants them to have fun. Right now, her children are in that difficult stage where they are trying to declare independence, but are dependent on their parents for at least a few more years. One of the side-effects of this stage is that her children have stopped seeing her as “cool”, and try to reduce the amount of communication between them. Whenever Bart is out, she wants to make sure that he’s safe, since he’s able to drive now and he’s already been in a couple of accidents, and if he’s ever in trouble or needs help, that he won’t hesitate to ask. But, whenever she tries to call him now, he simply ignores her calls. She even learned how to text, but that was to no avail -- he won’t answer her texts unless it involves something he wants. Lisa is slightly easier to deal with, but Marge still feels that tension between them every time she checks up with her while she’s out. She wants to know that they are safe, but she doesn’t want to annoy them.

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Bart is a seventeen year old who has recently gotten his driver’s license and stays out late partying and drinking with his friends. He would never call Marge in front of his friends, and doesn’t think that what he’s doing is any cause for concern; he’s never gone to the hospital, but he has smashed his car a few times (he was fine in both cases). He is really annoyed by what he sees as constant nagging from Marge, and he thinks that she’s going over the top by checking up with him so often. He wants to have fun with his friends, not talk to his mom, since that’s not cool. He wants to do as little as possible to make his mom not ground him.

Interview Results

Several feature requests were made during the interviews. Some parents with more difficult children like the Bart persona above would like automatic tracking, but children would most likely never go for that. For younger children, this may be ok. Some parents want to be able to set the reminder frequency for a check-in, or be able to instantaneously send a check-in request.

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A teenager we interviewed would like a very fast interface, and the option to ignore all optional information that their parents might want but don’t need.  However they would like space to be able to give a reason for not calling or checking in as well.  Ideally they would also like to be able to check in later, though this conflicts with the parent’s ideal.  If both their parents had the application, they would like the opportunity to check in with just one of them.

Task Analysis

Parents and children will have different tasks to perform in dealing with this problem.

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