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Luke is a freshman at college. His parents pay for his tuition and housing and provide him with $300 a month for food and other necessities. Luke wants to keep track of his spending so he always has enough money for food and textbooks and knows if he has any extra money for recreational activities.
Leia is a junior at college. Her parents pay for her tuition but do not give her money for food, housing, or any other expenses. Consequently, Leia works a part-time job so she can eat. Because her budget is so limited, she wants to be able to track her income flow in and out very carefully and needs to make a careful monthly budget for expenses like rent, the electric bill, and her weekly groceries.
Parents
Characteristics:
- 40-60 years old
- evenly male and female
- very basic experience with smartphones
- diverse ethnic backgrounds and origins (but basic proficiency with English)
- wide variation of income level
Vader is Luke's 42 year old father. He wants to keep track of his son's spending so he knows where his hard-earned money is going, and if his son asks him for more money he wants to make sure that his son has been responsible with what he's already been given.
Task Analysis
1.
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Register and log in (Luke and Vader)
- Create username/password (first time app users)
- Input username/password (repeat users)
This task is the entry point to the app, used to create an account for the user so that he can modify personal data. The user is assumed to have an email address that will be used for the username, and the user will generate his own password for this account.
This task can be performed anywhere as long as the user has a mobile phone that is connected to the Internet. The registration task is only performed once, but once the user has created an account, he can log in anytime afterwards or simply remain logged in, so overall, this task will be performed very infrequently.
This task will be learned by trying it as it will be consistent with other login and registration interfaces. The user might input the wrong username and/or password, but the interface will give immediate feedback so that the user can try again. Only the user is involved in this task
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- Filter map by category (later functionality)
- View i3 videos
- Read MIT student stories
- Browse dorm pictures and stats (cost, number of doubles, etc.)
- View direct comparison of different dorm features (cost, demographics, rooms)
Students are browsing information because they want to learn more about the dorms and about MIT student life in general. We assume the user has basic understanding of colleges (particularly dorm structure) and browsing websites.
Before reaching the browsing functionality, the homepage will include a brief blurb about how MIT Housing and dorm assignments work. This information will be sufficient for the user to begin browsing.
The task is learned by exploration. In general, getting confused by the information on the website and how to navigate it is the biggest way this task could go wrong, so it’s important that we design the browsing functionality to be very intuitive.
Part of this browsing involves reading the personal experiences that MIT students have posted, so in that sense the students here are indirectly interacting with MIT students, and the success of that feature of this task depends on task 2.
2. Submit advice or personal stories (Ash)
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