Page History

Problem Statement

Housing managers and desk workers need to efficiently manage dormitory-related duties. In particular, they need to efficiently manage static/transient resident information, resident access to dormitory housing, and resident billing/fees.

Currently, this is difficult because the systems responsible for these functions are on different, isolated platforms, thus unnecessarily duplicating work. In addition, existing desk software suffers from usability issues with respect to learnability, safety, and efficiency. Last, significant amount of resident information has yet to be digitized.

Notes from interviews

We interviewed several individuals with various positions in the MIT housing and facilities system.

...

• Most desk workers are computer-literate and thus they are usually able to learn how a given software platform works by playing with/exploring the software. However, even these computer-literate individuals are having usability issues with the current software used to handle most desk functions. Namely, the desk software is unlearnable, unsafe, and suffers from some GUI performance/efficiency issues.
• While desk workers who are experienced may know how to execute the commonly used tasks in the current desk software, they are unable to figure out how to execute less commonly used tasks when the need arises. Moreover, the software’s lack of learnability poses a steep learning curve for novice desk workers.
• A significant amount of resident information has yet to be digitized, blocking efficient desk worker performance.
• Desk workers struggle to enforce security restrictions on people entering the dormitory due to an inability to confront suspicious entrants and an inability to quickly access/refer to resident guest lists.

User Classes

1. Housing Managers:

1. Age: generally older than 50 years old
2. Education: educated in operations or dealing with managing systems
3. Experience: ##  
   1. Housing: 15+ years of housing experience
   2. Technology: Uses Windows computer and knows how to use the computer systems, but still am unsure how to deal with problems on the computer (e.g. what happens in response to a confirmation dialog)
4. Usage: deals with residential information on a normal basis

2. Desk Workers:

1. Age: 17-22 years old
2. Education: Candidate for Bachelor’s/Master’s degree at MIT (and thus generally proficient in verbal/mathematics skills)
3. Experience: ## Housing: Anywhere from 0 months to a few years of desk working experience
   1. Technology: Generally computer-literate. Comfortable with operating/exploring desktop software (on Windows at least), web applications, and mobile applications.
4. Usage: Deals with residential information (e.g., extremely static information like a resident’s room number or forwarding address as well as transient information like what items a student currently has on loan) on a normal basis.

Goals

1. House Managers## Easily charge residents fees and monitor monetary transactions with residents.
   1. Easily enable/disable student access to dormitories via students’ ID cards.
   2. Eliminate work redundancy (e.g., in maintaining consistent resident information) across disparate systems, each responsible for handling different housing functions.
2. Desk Worker## Efficiently read and update static resident information (e.g., student room number, forwarding address, etc.)  to handle student needs (e.g., redirecting mail to students’ forwarding addresses when students are absent).
   1. Efficiently read and update transient resident information (e.g., what items a student has on loan, what packages are available for said resident, etc.) for handling other student needs (e.g., checking in/out packages, etc.).

Appendix

Notes + Quotes from Additional Interviews

BK - undergraduate housing manager

...