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MoneyManager - GR1

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Team members: Stephanie Chang, Qian Long, Isabella Lubin

User Analysis

We have two main sources of user populations: college students and their parents.

College Students

Characteristics:
  • 18-23 years old
  • evenly male and female
  • proficient with technology
  • diverse ethnic backgrounds and origins (but basic proficiency with English)
  • wide variation of income level and spending capacities

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.

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

Our website is intended as a home-browsing, leisurely activity.  Thus, all of the below tasks will likely be performed indoors at a desk, on a computer, and the individual tasks have no time constraints and will likely be performed about once a week during the times that high school students are making their decisions (mid-March to the end of April about MIT, then June about dorms) and the MIT students are offering their personal experiences (potentially all year round, but with spikes during CPW and REX).

1. Browse information (Pichu/Pikachu/Raichu)

  • 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)

  • Precondition: logged in with MIT certificates
  • Post story associated with a particular location
  • Select whether or not others can ask questions about this story (If “yes”, then they are allowing others to email them)
  • Preview story 
  • Submit story
  • Delete story

The purpose of this task is for current MIT students to share their experiences with regards to a particular aspect of MIT life.

The preview feature allow the user to proofread what s/he has written before final submission to check for errors. Nonetheless, a user could still submit a story for the wrong dorm or accidentally mark that people may not ask follow-up questions, in which case they are able to delete the story and create a new one.

A potential use case would be students submitting malicious stories about other dorms. We may include an option to report stories for spam or abuse, or simply have an option to notify the webmasters/moderators to remove the story manually.

3. Ask a question (Pichu/Pikachu/Raichu)

  • Input email address and question about a particular student story
  • Preview question
  • CAPTCHA and submit question to the MIT student

Prefrosh and prospective students want to be able to communicate with current MIT students about their actual experiences. They will be able to do so by filling out a form linked to each story.  

The preview feature before final submission will allow the user to proofread for errors. On submission, an email containing the question will be sent to both the questioner and the author of the post.

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