The users would be MIT community members, the undergraduate students, graduate students, Post Docs and Professor.
Tim is a first year graduate student in the EECS department. He attends classes and lectures, and often has to meet with various Professors, TAs, Lab mates and friends for a variety of activities. He considers himself tech-savvy, but finds certain problems related to locating people and places within the campus annoying. For example, he needed to meet his Graduate Counselor to get an Add/Drop/Status Change form signed; and even though he had emailed, the counselor’s availability was a vague range (i.e. anytime before 5pm). He made several trips down on the same day and only managed to get what he needed after several tries.
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 also thinks that these communication methods are not always sufficiently fast. He doesn't like the current MIT directory page as it doesn't allow for filtering, but he thinks personal pages al not very helpful either.
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.
The main tasks identified are:
Goal: Find the location of a friend.
Sub Tasks
Preconditions
Time constraints: Search must be fast.
Frequency of use: Several times a day.
Goal: Add a person from institute’s directory to user’s friend list enabling the user to locate that person on a map view.
Sub Tasks
Preconditions
Frequency of use: Several times a day
Goal: Invite friends to join an event or a meeting.
Sub Tasks
Preconditions
Time constraints: Invites must be sent in real time.
Frequency of use: Several times a week.
Goal: Send response to an invite.
Sub Tasks
Preconditions
Frequency of use: Several times a week.