User Analysis

There are several types of users who will use our product. To detail each persona, we interviewed people from each user group:

-          Tim the Grad Student

-          Donald the Professor

-          ... the Undergrad Student

Tim the Graduate Student

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.

Lessons learned from  the Graduate Student

• To locate a stranger within the same institution, students have to resort to a multitude of resources in order to do so. (Google or directory for person’s office; whereis.mit to locate the physical location of the office. There is a need for a unified directory.
• There is no clear way to find out a person’s availability based on his/her location currently.
• There is no clear way to find people with similar interests currently.

Vincent the Professor

Vincent wants his research group to interact with each other by sharing ideas and receiving feedback. He wants to see how frequently his group members are meeting with each other, and with other research groups. Vincent sometimes comes across interesting research presentations and articles, so he wants to be able to easily forward this information to his students. He also wants his students' daily schedules to be easily accessible to his administrator, so that she can schedule meetings for his research group. Vincent often meets with people from visiting universities and companies, so he also wants the tool to help him find and locate people outside of MIT. Of course, Vincent wants the tool to be efficient, so that his group can still concentrate on finishing research work. He also expressed usefulness in being able to view how the sub-teams are spread out across the office space, perhaps to facilitate people in the same group being located close to one another.

Lessons learned from the Professor

• Overseeing students' research activities can be time-consuming. The app can help facilitate communication with his research group and between members in the research group.
• The app will be even more useful if it includes people from outside MIT.

Jeff the Undergrad

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 doesn't like the current MIT directory page as it doesn't allow for filtering.  Unfortunately, these electronic methods of communication are not always sufficiently fast and it may be difficult to find contact information through personal pages and directories.  

Lessons learned from the Undergrad

• There are many indirect methods of contacting people, which can be time consuming.  This is problematic in urgent situations.
• Current directories give no information on personal interests, this option with a filter would promote interest/hobby based communications.

Jermie the 2nd year Grad Student

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 meets the adviser to give status reports. Because his adviser is a busy person therefore 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. 

Lessons learned from the Undergrad

• People who are part of this organization for long enough have come up with different work around for situations such as arranging a meeting or discovering new people and have grown to accept them. 
• If we offer them a more convenient solution packaged in one easy to use UI only then they will realize what they wish they had or thought they were missing.

Task Analysis

The main tasks performed using our product include:

-          Search for a colleague

-          Enter user profile

-          Spontaneous meeting

-          Real-time visualization of nearby friends

-          View connections between colleagues

Search for a colleague

Goal: Find the location of a colleague.

Use Case:

1. Select the category of person you are looking for by selecting the interest, department, or group your colleague belongs to.

• At any point you may type in the person's name to narrow your search.

1. Identify and select the person you are looking for.
2. View profile for the selected person.
3. View the location for the selected person.

Preconditions:

-          Your colleague has a profile in the system.

-          Your colleague must "turn on" the app for you to find his location.

Time constraints: Search must be quick. Info presented must be concise.

Frequency of use: several times a day. 

Enter user profile

Goal: To present a unified profile view that contains up-to-date information about each user.

Use Case:

1. User wants to look for a person and does not have a centralized directory to do so.
2. User wants to find information about the user which is up-to-date and filled-in

Preconditions:

-          User has approved for a public directory listing.

-          User has filled in his/her user profile either manually or automatically by granting the app permission to populate the information

Time constraints: None

Frequency of use: several times a day, depending on the users preference. 

Spontaneous meeting

Goal: Get introduced to colleagues who share your similar personal and work interests.

Use Case:

1. You or your colleague enter a public area (e.g. office kitchen, hallway, etc.).
2. You and your colleague are identified as sharing a certain level of similar interests.
3. You and your colleague are notified of your shared interests.
4. You and your colleague are given the option to schedule a conversation at a future time.

Preconditions:

-          You and your colleague are identified as being open to introductions.

-          You and your colleague are not busy during the current timeframe.

Time constraints: Matching must occur in under 30 seconds. Notification should present concise information on your shared interests or connections.

Frequency of use: several times a day, depending on the users preference. 

Real-time visualization of nearby friends

Goal: Enable the ability to locate pre-approved friend(s) on a map view

Use Case:

1. You wish to know about the availability of the person based on whether he/she is present in his office
2. You wish to know about locality of colleagues in order to organize impromptu meetings 
3. For finer grained information, the system would display the user's location in text as well.

Preconditions:

• You and your colleagues would have pre-approved the sharing of location information.
• You and your colleagues would have turned on location-sharing

Frequency of use: Daily

View connections between colleagues

Goal: Show strength of connections between employees based on their interactions and/or teams.

Use Case:

1. Select a group, such as your project team, friends, or department.
2. View the strength of connections between members in the selected group.
3. View the people (outside the group) who have strong connections with members inside the selected group.
4. Select a person and view their profile and major connections.
5. View associations between people based on their teams.

Alternative Use Cases: 

• Search for a person and be introduced to that person via a mutual connection.
• Maximize office layout based on teams or any other profile information.

Preconditions:

• Users approve sharing of their activity with their colleagues.
• Users team information filled in.

Frequency of use: Daily or several times weekly.