GR1 - Project Proposal and Analysis

User Analysis

Many users experience difficulties when trying to schedule their courses for the semester. After interviewing three MIT students we concluded that the following issues were common problems that the users faced when trying to schedule courses:

• When making a schedule, had to first look up times on the course catalog on websis. Some problems with this are:
  • Difficult find whether class in sp or fall
  • Recitation times are not out before official schedule comes out
  • Graphical design hard to read
  • Not interactive
• After making the initial rough schedule, then had to wait for the official schedule to come out on websis. Problems:
  • Did not have all recitations listed, so had to go back to the course catalog to recheck all recitation times
  • Hard to read (not laid out graphically, only text )
• After finding a schedule time that works, had to then ask friends for information on which recitation they were taking. Problems:
  • Takes time, very inefficient
  • Have to keep track of all friend's recitation times by yourself
• After finalizing the schedule, have to make a calendar on Google calendar then take a screen capture to share with friends

Task Analysis

Users would like to be able to perform all the steps of creating a class schedule in one central location, which includes creating and optimizing the schedule and sharing with friends. The high level tasks have been listed below.

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