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We have identified the following main user classes, but it is possible for a user to belong to more than one of these classes:
Living Group Resident/College Student:
People living in close proximity often share many similar interests and need to perform the same tasks on a regular basis. For example, college students need to work together on problem sets, go to the grocery store, exercise, or unwind in a social environment. In any living group, there may be a critical mass of people that are looking to complete the same task at any given time but it’s hard to find out everything that everyone is interested in doing without the risk of being intrusive. This is where FriendTrain comes in handy.
Living group residents interviewed have expressed interest in coordinating the following tasks:
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In addition, this group of users has expressed a desire to have control over the participants in any particular activity. That is, they wouldn’t want to go to the movies with just anyone, they would want to be able to specify a group of people in their contacts that they would be willing to go with (and not include people they wouldn’t want to go with).
Working adult:
Users belonging to this class spend upwards of 40hours/week with peers they might not know well enough to contact in a social context, but share similar needs/location. For example, coworkers might take lunches at similar times but may not have the means to coordinate these activities spontaneously.
Working adults have expressed interest in:
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Working adults also expressed a strong preference for setting specific dates and times in which events should occur. They also mentioned that they currently use email to coordinate activities such as lunch while at work, but felt it was tedious to use email because it was not centralized and hard to coordinate a spontaneous group activity.
Parent:
Users belonging to the parent category have children, and therefore have similar necessities. Taking care of a kid is something a parent struggles with from time to time, and this demographic could benefit greatly from a technology that makes it easy to coordinate tasks quickly.
Parents would use this service for things like:
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The parent class is interesting, because there can be adults who both work and are parents. This indicates a need for our design to have some sort of flexibility to overlap between different user groups.
Task analysis:
The main tasks involved in interaction with the FriendTrain application are: 1.
- Organizing Contacts
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- Activity Administration
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- Joining Activities
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- Finalizing Activity Details
1. Organizing Contacts
To interact with other users through the application, each user must maintain a list of approved contacts. These contacts may be categorized into groups based on the user’s preferences.
Subtasks* Find contacts who also have the app
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