GR1 - Task Analysis

User Analysis

The website will be open to two major types of users, current MIT students and MIT alumni. Note that the suggested personas are derived from 3 student interviews (1 undergraduate, 1 graduate and 1 alumni). The names were altered for privacy purposes. 

Students

Graduate and Undergraduate students will be able to post and read articles.  They will also be able to hold start discussion threads about issues at MIT or have friendly flame wars without bombarding users’ inboxes.  They will also be able to find information about a large number of academic and social events.

Characteristics:

Students will range between ages late teens to late twenties.  We expect most of these users to be experienced with computers and social networking sites.  Our users will be  motivated to find  new ways to socialize, find out information about MIT, discuss random topics of interest, etc.

Personas:

  • Justin Beaver is a second-year graduate computer science major interested in specializing in artificial intelligence. Though somewhat shy, he freely discusses sports and world politics.  He reads technology news sources online to find out about cool new projects. He also likes to read The Economist, CNN, Sports Illustrated on his spare time. He occasionally watches television, though it is mostly to watch college basketball and NBA. He once even stooped so low as to go to an MIT undergraduate party, but he realized it was not his scene. Justin Beaver has a difficult time deciding what to do  on weekends to socialize, and often ends up following his friends to terrible parties. He wishes he could find out about parties more easily. When it comes to social networking, Justin Beaver has a Facebook and checks in maybe once a week. He tends to stay away from discussions on the web because he gets easily annoyed by internet trolls and ignorance.
  • Beaverly is a third-year chemistry major interested in finding new renewable energy resources. Beaverly is on the board for the MIT Finboard, and is part of Alpha Alpha Alpha sorority and the MIT Assassin's Guild. Most of the week is devoted to doing homework, publicizing events, and dealing with other student groups. While she works hard on the weekdays to keep up with all her commitments, Beaverly spends much of her weekend video gaming. She and three of her friends are avid Starcraft II and Call of Duty: Black Ops players. They enjoy going out to eat on weekends, but they don’t often go to parties. Beaverly also likes cooking, and runs the Sunday meal that her sorority holds every week.

Alumni

MIT alumni will be able to stay up to date on MIT news and also start discussions with students should they have projects/job opportunities for students.  They can also create discussions to advise current students or catch up with fellow alumni.

Characteristics:

We expect alumni users will range in age from early twenties to late forties.  We expect most of these users to be computer literate, some with limited experience with social networking sites.  These users will be motivated to stay connected to MIT.

Personas:

  • Wang graduated from MIT 3 years ago.  She just started her own company and is looking for partners.  She still knows current students at MIT completing their graduate degrees and is looking to get in touch with them. However, she would also like to publicize her company’s info sessions to the students so she can attract more highly-skilled workers.  Wang really enjoyed her experience and MIT and creating her own company and really wants to encourage more students to do so. She likes to occasionally look at web.mit.edu to see what’s going on at MIT. She would also like to possibly form new friendships with current students and alumni, both in person and online.

Tasks Analysis

The goal of this website is to provide a localized way for MIT students and alumni to be able to discuss various topics, post articles, and look for or post events. We have come up with the following necessary tasks. In addition, we want users to be able to recommend articles, discussions, and events. Each user will be able to vote once for a discussion as “good”, “bad”, or abstain. Posts with high recommendation rating will appear on the front page, while those with bad ratings will be put at the end. Finally, we wish users to be able to deal with errors easily. The user may either edit a post he or she has already made, or delete it altogether. While discussion threads cannot be deleted after a certain time period, it will be possible to delete events. This will encourage users to contribute to discussions more freely. In addition, we will allow users to post anonymously if they wish to not be known; however, the actual poster will be known to the website administrators, to prevent questionable content from being posted.

Post Article

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Provide link to article: user must copy a link from some other website

Read Article

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Find article: The user must browse or search for an article topic

Comment on Article

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Find article: The user must browse or search for an article topic

Post Discussion

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Enter discussion title
  • Type Discussion question or comment

Join Discussion

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Find discussion: The user must browse or search for a discussion topic
  • Comment on thread

Post Event

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Enter time and location: User must know time and place for event to be held
  • Enter event description

Read Event

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Find Event: The user must browse or search for an event

Search Articles, Discussions, and Events

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Enter Search Query

Undo/Edit Post

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Undo/Edit: after posting, users have a time frame in which they can undo or edit a post

Remove Post

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Delete post: users can delete their own comments to posts and events

Vote on postings

  • Log in: The user must have an account
  • Find and read posting: user can browse and search for a topic
  • Vote on the posting: user can give the posting a thumbs up or down

Domain Analysis

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1 Comment

  1. Tsung-Hsiang Chang

    • The problem statement and user analysis are great.
    • The task analysis is too sketchy and has too many similar tasks. It looks like you have several independent interfaces for each task, rather than starting from a single entry to use the system. Some subtasks could be essential and critical in your system, e.g. to find or browse articles/discussions/events. You should focus on a smaller domain and think it thoroughly, rather than do many shallow tasks.
    • The domain analysis is not completed, e.g. different user classes, voting, reading, searching are missing.