GR1: Analysis 

User Analysis

The users would be MIT community members, the undergraduate students, graduate students, Post Docs and Professor.

Characteristics

1. Age varies from 18 and above, for both male and female user.
2. English-speaking.
3. Computer literate.
4. Have busy schedules.
5. Are interested in socializing..

Case Studies

1. Tim the 1st Year Grad Student (Age 26).
2. Jeff the 3rd Year Undergrad Student (Age 20).
3. Jermie the 2nd Year Grad Student (Age 25).

1: Tim the 1st Year 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.

2: Jeff the 3rd Year Undergraduate Student

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.

3: Jermie the 2nd Year Graduate 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 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.

Lessons learned

• To locate each other within the same institution, students have to resort to a multitude of resources.
• There indirect methods of contacting people can be time consuming, which is problematic in urgent situations.
• There is no clear way to find out a person’s availability based on his/her current location.
• People who have been part of MIT for a long enough use "work-arounds" to arrange meetings or to discover new people and they have grown to accept these "work-arounds."
• A convenient solution packaged in one easy-to-use UI will enable people to request for availability of a large group in fast and hassle free way and successfully arrange a well organized event or a meeting on a relatively short notice.

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  Task Analysis

The main tasks identified are:

1. Find a friend
2. Add a friend
3. Invite friends to Event/Meeting
4. RSVP to an Event/Meeting Invitation

1: Find a friend

Goal: Find the location of a friend.

Sub Tasks

1. Open list of friends
2. Enter a name in the "Search" bar
3. Identify the person you are looking for by browsing through the list of search results displayed, and select it by clicking or tapping on the entry
4. View the location for the selected person on map or as a text

Preconditions

1. User's friend must also use the app
2. User must have the approval from the person he/she is looking for (must be added as friend)

Time constraints: Search must be fast.  

Frequency of use: Several times a day.

2: Add Friend

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

1. Search for a user from the directory
2. Send friend request using "Add as friend" button.
3. When the friend approves or disapproves a request, user will be notified and friend list will be updated accordingly.

Preconditions

1. User's friend also uses the app

Frequency of use: Several times a day

3: Invite friends to a Event/Meeting

Goal: Invite friends to join an event or a meeting.

Sub Tasks

1. Enter event/meeting details (time, place, and additional notes).
2. Search for friends to invite to the meeting.
3. Send invite
4. View friends’ RSVP

Preconditions

1. User must have the invitees added as friends.

Time constraints: Invites must be sent in real time.

Frequency of use: Several times a week.

4: RSVP to an Event/Meeting invitation

Goal: Send response to an invite.

Sub Tasks

1. Receive event invitation notification.
2. Select a response from “accept/decline”
3. Add additional notes with response.
4. Send response.

Preconditions

1. None.

Frequency of use: Several times a week.