Scenario
Ben is , a recruiter for a Software company, is looking for a student in the Computer Science department to develop software for mobile devices.
Ben goes to the MIT Jobs site and signs up for an account by providing his name, his role (recruiter), his email address, name of the Company he represents and the password for the website. Next, Ben creates a job post with the following specifications: position- Software Developer, type- internship, Course: 6, job group- Software, required competences- Java, location- Cambridge Massachusetts, application instructions- send resume by email, and deadline: March 11, 2010.
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Alyssa decides to contact Ben to inquire about the posting, and get some more details about the project. She writes the message to Ben and sends it. Ben receives the message and replies. They set up a meeting time to interviewfollow-up interview times.
Dragos, an undergraduate at MIT studying Computer Science, is also looking for an internship during the summer. Like Alyssa, he is also good in Java. He already interviewed for a company that he is very interested in, but he would like to keep himself posted on a few other interesting opportunities for which he is qualified. He goes to the MIT Jobs site and decides to follow Ben’s job posting so that he gets updates about the posting.
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Ben then decides that Alyssa will fill the position, and sends an update to all followers of the post that the position is closed. Dragos receives an update regarding the samersame.
Storyboard designs
Design 1
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This design is very efficient, since the user is on average three clicks away from whatever information it he/she needs. First, For example; to sign in or sign up, second to choose the right tab, and then to choose the relevant information within the tab. The only problem is that the user needs to sign in every time that enters in the website, which makes the website less efficient. We could work around this by making it such that a user can choose to “stay logged on”.
Visibility:
The main objects, browsing, posts ans messages, are very visible, since they executable tasks are at the top of the page, right after the “MIT Jobs” logo. If the user needs to do some task related to messaging, posting or browsing, there is a clear tab indicating them. Also, for an employer, the button to create a post is always visible at the top-right of the page, making it very simple to the employer to create a post.
There is the problem when reading posts or messages that . These are displaed as overlay objects on the browser. Since the message or the post is over the screen and , nothing can be done except on the site other than editing the post or message on the website. But when replying to messages, the old messages is always appended at the end of the reply, so the user knows what is the content of the original message.
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The buttons have a clear description of what the actions they make trigger (like delete or follow), but there is no way of undoing any action. When creating a post, a recruiter can just close the overlay object to discard, but it might be better to actually include a “Discard” button. Similarly for the creation of a message, we had envisioned closing the overlay object to discard the message, but it might provide more affordance to the user if we put a “Discard” button in this case also.
Design 2
In this design, Ben comes to the website (Figure 1) and clicks on the “Sign Up” button.
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