School Finding Scenario
Mrs. Black has a daughter (Rebecca) who is currently a junior in high school and is thinking about applying to colleges. Rebecca has decided that she would like to go to be a doctor or a nurse some day and would like to go to medical school or get her nursing degree. Mrs. Black and Rebecca live in Washington D.C., but Rebecca has heard that Northeastern has a really great nursing program and wants to visit that school. Mrs. Black is excited to take Rebecca to Boston to visit Northeastern, but while they are there she would like to make the trip even more worthwhile and visit other schools in the New England area that Rebecca might be interested in attending. However, Mrs. Miller doesn't yet know of any other schools that fit Rebecca's criteria near Boston.
To make matters more complex, Mrs. Black wants to consider Rebecca's activities and qualifications:
- GPA: 3.63 SATs: Math: 730 Critical Reading: 710 Writing: 620
- Premed or nursing program
- Soccer (either varsity, club or intramural)
- In or near the city
- Greek life on campus
Therefore in order to make the most of the trip she must:
- Find schools of similar caliber to Northeastern in Boston that also have premed or nursing programs
- Find the tour times and information session times for each school on the visit
- Plan an itinerary that allows them to efficiently visit schools and get a little bit of sightseeing in
Walking Through Storyboards
In response to our scenario, we would like each of the designs we created to walk Mrs. Black through the process and generate the following list: Northeastern, Boston University, Boston College, and Tufts (all have nursing or premed programs, and are feasible for Rebecca's GPA/SAT range, some might be good fit and some might be slight reach schools). The idea of our final interface will probably be a combination of these three designs because we will want it to focus on the two major tasks:
- Find similar fit schools in a certain geographic region (either have one school in mind, or generate a list of schools based on expected criteria)
- Create an itinerary that would allow Mrs. Black and Rebecca to visit all of the schools (attending all of the tours and information sessions), and then allow this itinerary to be customizable.
"Amazon" Interface
For this model, Mrs. Black will begin with an Amazon-like shopping cart interface that gives her the opportunity to search by the features of Rebecca's requirements that seem to hold the most weight, and will generate a list of similar schools (analogous to websites that have suggestions like "people who liked this also liked..."). By using these search filters and recommendations, Mrs. Black will be able to begin adding schools to her "shopping cart" or list of places that she will visit with Rebecca.
In this scenario, Mrs. Black begins her search by selecting the "Search by State" option, because she knows she will want to visit schools in the Boston area, and maybe Massachusetts as a whole.
Now Mrs. Black can begin selecting schools and adding them to her shopping cart (and eventually her itinerary). Specific school details will appear as she searches through the schools and she can find matches similar to her other choices. She begins by adding Northeastern to her shopping cart, and then eventually is able to include Boston University, Boston College, and Tufts in her shopping cart.
Once Mrs. Black is satisfied with the schools she has selected, she is able to "check out" from the system and generate a series of possible itineraries that will allow her to visit all of the schools on her list without the tour times conflicting, and will allow for some customizability in the final itinerary as they plan their trip to visit all of the schools.
Interactive Map
This interface is much more visual and allows Mrs. Black to immediately zoom in to the specific areas that she is interested in, while filtering for Rebecca's interests and qualifications for the college process. The first map allows Mrs. Black to begin selecting important features and zoom and select a region of interest. Once she has selected the New England area as her first area of interest, she could zoom further or begin to see schools represented as pins in the map. When clicked on each of these colleges a description will be pulled up with important statistics (e.g. average SAT scores/GPA of admitted students) and key tour times that might be necessary for planning to a visit. As she inspects schools Mrs. Black can decide to add those schools to her current selections or go back to searching other schools and clicking on other pins in the map. Since Rebecca is particularly interested in urban schools, eventually Mrs. Black can zoom in to the city level and just look closely at the Boston schools she as selected on a map. In the final screen Mrs. Black can see the generated itinerary with a map view showing the route from one school to the next (to stay consistent with the overall map interpretation of the problem).
In this design, Mrs. Black would log on and immediately begin to filter her search by the criteria that Rebecca finds most important. By having an interface similar to other travel websites, it will allow her to quickly begin searching for schools fitting into certain categories. Once she selects the criteria a list of schools will be generated ("Results" in the second panel) and all of the schools will be put onto a map so Mrs. Black can see relative locations and make selections of schools that she would like to visit.
After making her selections Mrs. Black will be brought to a screen showing all of the possible itineraries that she could use to get to visit all of the colleges and go on tours and information sessions. There will also be a list of activities happening at each school that fit within her criteria (e.g. varsity soccer games this weekend) so that they can see if there is something they would like to attend and add it to their itinerary. Then she can select an itinerary or components of the schedule and add them to a Google-Calendar type interface where the whole trip can be laid out. She can save multiple itineraries and thus plan all of her college tours through this website.