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Martha uses a personal whiteboard to manage her TODO list. When she decides to do errands, she copies the whiteboard to a post-it note and then goes down the post-it note in order. Most of the time, Martha's roommate Rachael asks her to do some common area tasks, like buy paper towels, liquor, and such. When this happens, Rachael will give Martha another TODO list, and Martha will use both of them for the errand run.
Lessons learned from Martha:
- 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.
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- 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
Description:
"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.
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User 3: The Novice Traveler, "Kevin"
Statistics:
- Age/Gender: 22/Male
- Education: Just graduated from a 4 year university
- Culture: American
- Language: English
- Computer experience: uses a smartphone, basic Windows experience
- Motivation: Planning a vacation
- Domain experience: No previous experience in planning trips
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