USER 1: Hungry and Poor Grad Student
1. Jacob is a 3rd year grad student in the EECS department. He sustains himself on a monthly stipend of 2000 $ a month ($1600 after tax). He pays 800 dollars for an apartment in Central Square. Jacob looks to save every extra penny wherever possible. He currently spends about 6 dollars a meal and has around on average 2.5 meals a day for an average expenditure of 15 $ a day and 450 $ a month. He wants to bring down his expenditure so that he can go to movies , concerts and occasionally savour some caviar at a fancy restaurant. His life outside lab is quite limited to just hanging out at cheap coffee places with his friend. He doesn’t have the money to enjoy these finer pleasures of life. He has an account of campus-food where he saves a cool 10 dollars a month on discount coupons but he wants to save more. Jacob is also a choosy man despite his monetary situation. He likes to enjoy certain types of cuisine. He is not one to have wings and fries. He wants lo mein and pasta and the likes. He therefore wants a convenient way of discovering where in his vicinity he can find a cheap or preferably a free meal. He would also be liked to told what kind of meal it is. And he would also love a way to find out about the cheap art events that are happening so that he and his friends can chill for free or close to nothing.
USER 2: President of SAAS Association
Nikhil is the current president of the South Asian Association of Students (SAAS). He is a 20 year old busy MIT student, and is majoring in course 15, one of the hardest majors at MIT. The previous president of SAAS left him with the reins of SAAS without really giving much advice on how to handle SAAS. Nikhil is usually too busy planning and organizing the events that SAAS throws (as well as finishing his insanely difficult problem sets), so he doesn’t have much time to advertise these events, so he usually sends a e-mail to MIT mailing lists, as well as create a facebook event page. The problem is, many of his e-mails gets lost in the inboxes of SAAS members, and enough SAAS members don’t have a facebook account. Furthermore, other people -- who aren’t interested in SAAS in any way, -- often tell Nikhil to stop sending these e-mails. Nikhil wants to find a way to target his events’ advertisements to SAAS members without disrupting other members of the MIT community, while still allowing the other member to discover some of the public SAAS events. Finally, since Nikhil is 20 and some events may (or may not) contain beverages generally not recommended for adults under 21, Nikhil wants only those people who he trusts at MIT (the SAAS community) to be able to see the event, which is hard for him to do through e-mail lists or facebook events.
USER 3: Overwhelmed Freshman
User is a 18 year old freshman at MIT. He is doing fine in his 5 classes and is often overwhelmed with all that is happening at MIT (ranging from info sessions, to special seminars to cultural events). Many a times he hears about a hindustani classical performance being held in Kresgie on a Friday night only after all tickets have been sold out. He often misses out on valuable info sessions by companies he’d kill to work for. He wishes only if there was a place to go find such information in a more organized and easily searchable way, college would be perhaps be half as much fun he had imagined it to be in high school.
INTERVIEW 1
We interviewed David(name changed to protect privacy) who is a grad student in EECS. He is always on his Macbook doing either work or just surfing the web. He complains about the very low stipend grad students get paid and said would love for a service that provides him with information about events on campus that have free food in a more organised manner. He says he has to routinely scan the Course 6 mailing list to find these events. He considers this highly inefficient and says it wastes a lot of time and has often thought of coding up a website to provide such a service on his own but says his code always crashes. He also likes music and plays a lot. His favorite musical genres are jazz and bluegrass (yes, he’s really out there) but says he can really not afford to go to a concert and would love it if he knew of some cheap or even free events that he and his friends-who finds themselves in a similar situation- could go to. He also likes watching drama plays and would like to find a place where he could more efficiently find these plays.
INTERVIEW 2
We interviewed Samantha, who likes to to be called Sammie (but never Sammy). Sammie is a course 16 major at MIT. Sammie is the president of a Fairly Large Social Society at MIT (referred from now on as FLSSAM). FLSSAM has a lot of members, but they are always looking to get more members. FLSSAM throws about 1 event a month, which Sammie needs to advertise for. Right now, Sammie sends out e-mails and facebook event updates, but these methods are not well-targeted or don’t target his entire user base. She sometimes gets complaints from her friends that they haven’t heard about the events, and complaints from strangers that they have heard about them too often. She needs an efficient way to target his events that she advertises for.
INTERVIEW 3:
Interview 3:
We interviewed Saya Date. She is an international student from India. This is the first time she is in US. She is living in Next House, taking 4 classes and does crew. While she has a fairly close knit community on her floor, she still wants to experience more of whats happening at MIT. She thinks that although she is involved in a fair amount of activities but hearing over and over again about the various cool events her different set of friends went to she feels she is missing out on the college experience.
Sometimes she does mark out events that interest her, but ends up not going, because of lack of any good company.
She would like to know about the events that are happening, which of her friends are planning to go to them integrated some sort of expected rating of the event to filter/choose the events she really wants to go, etc.
She'd also love if she could get some sort of notification if an event of her liking is put up.
She'd also like if there was a one-step way to add things to the calender she uses - google calender.
She also recommended if she could get notified of an event outside her natural interests is getting exceptional buzz on campus or a lot of her close friends are raving to go to. This could help her explore things beyond her established taste.
Task Analysis
Create Account on Website
- frequency of task: only once for people who want to upload or personalize content. Never for those who just want to peruse the content
- preconditions: knowing the url for the web app, having an mit.edu email address/web certificate.
- sign up** provide a unique mit.edu email address and password (or using a web certificate)
- confirm the email address
Login/Access website:
- frequency of task: depends on the user. Someone looking for free food might look daily. Those managing events might only look daily within a week of their event.
- precondition: know the url for the app (and have a certificate to create an event)
- log in:** provide certificate (or other identifying credentials)
Interact with the Website:
- Upload an event** frequency: depends on the user. Those organizing career fair stuff might do it 5 times a day for 3 weeks, and never again in the semester. Others might do it consistently once a month.
- precondition: logged in
- edit type/time/location of event
- Select privacy settings for event, and which users to advertise to (alert or not)
- Note: you can also upload an event by sending the anne hunter e-mail to our servers and our brilliant machine learning filters will create the event automatically
- Filter events** Preconditions: none (well, you must be on the website)
- Frequency: everytime you are looking for an event. This varies from user to user.
- By categories.*** I want to see a classical indian performance.
- By time*** I want free food Thursday for lunch. What are my options
- By popularity*** I want to go where ALL the cool kids are going
- Manage Groups and Notifciations** preconditions: must be logged in with a username
- frequency: not that often
- Create/delete a groups*** add members to the group
- manage groups privacy settings
- Join/leave a group
- Change notification settings (e-mail, text, etc.)
- Rate an event/Mark event** preconditions: once per event per person going to it
- mark the event to let everyone know you are coming*** or mark it annonymously but still get the number of people count higher
- Rate an event to indicate that the event is totally rad or is worse than a 6.813 lecture (just kidding)