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- Tasks are important, venue isn't necessarily important. Moreover, sometimes where not to go is more important than where to do. Martha had to buy a picture frame. Martha didn't really care where we got the frame from, as long as it wasn't Walmart (we eventually went to Target).
- It would be very useful to have a smartphone say things like "start getting ready to leave now" and "you have 10 more minutes before you have to leave the supermarket"---especially if planning errands is done for you.
- Efficient grocery shopping is perhaps a more important problem than planning out a place-to-place schedule. Most people fill a TODO list with groceries and look for the groceries in that order once they get to the store. This usually wastes an hour for a large grocery run. If users input their grocery list as a set of tasks, it seems that it would be very useful to sort the items by type.
- Specifying "do this errand first" and "do this errand last" is a very important constraint. In the wintertime, Martha always stops at the Starbucks first so that the coffee keeps her warm. In the summertime, she always does this step last as a reward for finishing her errands. She usually incorporates lunch into her errands, and likes to get get lunch last so that she can eat it at home once she is done.
User 2: Stay-at-home-
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mom, "Elaine"
Statistics:
- Age/Gender: 42/Female
- Education: A year at Duke.
- Culture: American
- Language: English
- Physical limitations: bad eyes
- Computer Experience: general using the internet, playing games, research.
- Motivation: get errands done and try not to be so OCD/anal about things.
- Domain Experience: has been running errands since...age 18?
- Application Experience: can use google maps, calendar, email, etc. on
"Elaine" is a middle-aged stay-at-home mom whose kids have moved out of the house and whose husband works in the city. She tends not to be busy, but by habit likes to optimize things...except for spending too much time optimizing. She has a car but also access to bus and thus also rail into the city.
Lessons learned:
- Might have Has a car only intermittently (husband usually drives into the wharf to take the ferry in.)
- Not certain which stores have things, so will check something closer
- before visiting something farther.
- Is parking availiable? also quantity and size of parking spaces.
- Some errands are flexible: can do them at really any time and possibly drop.
- she can have issues driving at night and doesn't like driving in inclement weather.
- Even for things where she can drop stuff off, prefers to do that when it is open.
- For picking up something from a pharmacy, she'd call ahead of time.
- She would do grocery shopping later because foodis perishable. This is weather dependent: Is it cold?
- Are things being bought in bulk or not.
- Is the neighborhood safe? If not, goods are also likely lower quality
She'd been meaning to see if she should actually switch to a different route, so I asked her to let me watch her do that. to To do so, she actually wanted to use a paper map (because she would usually do this in the car mid-trip. Perhaps that means we should do this for mobile devices?), and she traced out her route on that, (also explaining about the trip she would take to run errands) but did not actually determine which route she would prefer and said that she'd look that up on the computer later.
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