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User Analysis
Lorem ipsum...At a high level, our user population can be categorized into students or instructors (e.g., TAs). However, since different kinds of students will use the application differently, students are broken down into two subcategories: more active (or "organized") students, and more passive (or "lazy") students. For the user analysis, we have interviewed one of each type of users:
- Olivia, the Organized Student
- Levi, the Lazy Student
- Tina, the TA
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Tina has been a TA for two years, and she currently uses a number of websites and online tools to communicate with her students. She is not satisfied with the current way of entering this information , (which sometimes involves editing HTML files on her computer and uploading them using FTP). As a student, she uses Google Calendar to organize her assignments. At the beginning of a term, she schedules all her test dates in a personal calendar. As a TA, one of her concerns is getting the word out when a change is made to an assignment. Tina believes that a collaborative organizer would benefit her more as a student than as a TA, but she also thinks that such tool should support the specific needs of TAs and instructors. She is particularly interested in collecting assignments statistics, such as difficulty and time to completion. She believes the collaborative nature of the tool would not make it less reliable, especially if moderated by the TAs.
Lessons learned from TATina:
- TAs could have the role of moderators
- Changes in assignments are a real-world problem
- TAs and instructors could use the tool to collect statistical information
Task Analysis
Lorem ipsum...The problem analysis and user interviews revealed several high-level tasks performed by our users. Some of the tasks to be supported by the application include:
- Creating a Class Feed
- Subscribing to a Class Feed
- Creating an Assignment
- Marking Completing an Assignment as Completed
Creating & populating a Class Feed
- Goal: Enter a new class, with its assignments, into the system
- Frequency of use: At the beginning of a semester, once per class
- Subtasks:
- Create the new class
- Add one or more assignments
- Preconditions:
- A descriptive name for the new class feed
- A list of assignments with due dates
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- Goal: Subscribe to the feed for a class, so its assignments will show up on your due list
- Frequency of use: At the beginning of a semester, once per class
- Subtasks:
- Find the desired class in the list of class feeds
- Find an official (ie TA-made) feed, if it exists
- Preconditions:
- Knowing the class name
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- Goal: Add an assignment, either to a class feed, where it will be visible to all students, or to a private feed, visible only to you
- Frequency of use: Varied: anywhere from once per assignment to never.
- Subtasks:
- Choose the feed to add the assignment to
- Add assignment details
- Preconditions:
- A due date for the assignment
Marking Completing an Assignment as Completed
- Goal: Mark an assignment as done, so that it does not appear in the due list
- Frequency of use: Up to once per assignment (several times a week)
- Subtasks:
- Mark the assignment as done
- Fill in assignment statistics (optional)
- Preconditions:
- A completed assignment