GR2 - Designs
Scenario
Bob is the president of a club at MIT called Save the Whales. This club is currently asking for donations to support a non-profit foundation that conducts research in whale habitat preservation and administering medicine to sick and injured whales. The club’s members’ primary goal is to raise as much money as possible, and their secondary goals include raising awareness for their cause and recruiting more members into their club. Our application can help Bob with his primary goal, to raise as much money as possible for the foundation.
In order to raise money, Bob created a bunch of colorful posters advertising the cause and hung them in bulletin boards all around MIT. He also set up a table near lobby 7 with fliers and jars to collect money. Bob’s friend, Jamie, is a junior at MIT majoring in course 6 and 8. She is taking six classes this semester in order to graduate early, so she does not have time to join any clubs even though she feels really strongly about saving the whales. She sees the posters posted around campus and once ran into Bob in lobby 7 while he was asking for donations.
Because Jamie usually buys her lunch with TechCash, she does not carry very much cash on hand. Thus she wasn’t able to donate to the Save the Whales club that day she met Bob in lobby 7. She is also too busy to go to Save the Whales meetings, so she can’t think of any other way to donate money. She is also very forgetful at times and can’t remember when Bob will be in lobby 7 asking for donations, so it is hard for her to bring cash on her in order to donate.
However, all is not lost. Bob decides to set up an account on Donate2Us about Save the Whales, so he could invite busy people like Jamie who want to donate but don’t have the time. He goes on Donate2Us and creates a page for his cause. He enters in relevant information telling all visitors to the page about how the club wants to donate money to fund research on saving whales and to support other activities for whale preservation. Setting up a page and picking a nice graphic logo for the cause was fast and easy.
Bob then tells Jamie that she can download the application on her iPhone called Donate2Us. There, Jamie can select the cause ‘Save the Whales’ and be able to donate directly via her phone! Despite Jamie’s busy schedule, she does use her phone a lot, so it won’t take very long for her to download the app and quickly select the amount of money she wishes to donate.
This is great for Jamie, because she just spent her last week’s UROP paycheck on food, and she lives the life of a poor, broke college student. She wants to donate, but she doesn’t want to look cheap in front of Bob, and she also wasn’t sure how much she was able to afford just yet. Using the application, she could deliberate on how much she could donate and make a decision without being pressured and without giving over her limit.
Through the application, Bob can select friends to invite to join this application. His invitees will then get a text message with a link to his page’s site on the web application. Thus, he selects Jamie’s name and sends Jamie the link. Jamie has never heard of Donate2Us, so she has to download it first before she can browse the different charities on this application. She downloads the application from the mobile store, creates an account on the application, and visits the page of Save the Whales. She thinks about how much she wants to donate and decides that she can donate $50 this week (if she lives on ramen for three days), and so pledges $50. She enters her credit card information and presses “Donate” and gets a confirmation email a few seconds later telling her that she has, indeed, donated $50.
This made her feel really good actually, since throughout her three years so far at MIT she hasn’t had the time to help out many community service causes. She’s just been too busy. The main reason she decided to be course 6 and 8 was so she could use her programming and physics skills in order to develop ways to provide safe drinking water and nutritious food to malnourished children in third world countries. Thus, she decides that before she could do that directly, she should donate money to these causes near and dear to her as well and help out indirectly. She goes to Donate2Us and searches for a cause: “feed third world children” and finds a list of applicable causes asking for donations. She reads the descriptions of each and finds the one she feels most strongly about and pledges another $50 to that cause (and now must live on ramen for 6 days). However, she is happy that she finally has the chance to help out in her own little way!
Designs
Design 1: Simplicity
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