GR1 - Analysis

User Analysis

Flashcards are generally used only by students or by someone learning something new. Here are a few personas representative of the different ways that flashcards may be used:

• Thomas the foreign language student
• Autumn the art history student
• Watson the pre-med student

Thomas the foreign language student

Thomas looks forward to travelling, and in particular enjoys being able to converse in foreign languages. He often studies new vocabulary by using flashcards. His flashcards tend to be simple - for example, one side may have a Spanish word, and the other side has its English translation. However, for some languages, such as Japanese, he needs the Japanese kanji, the corresponding romanji, and the English translation.

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Flashcards for learning foreign languages will need to allow accents, as well as foreign alphabets and characters.

Autumn the art history major

Autumn is required to learn about many different art pieces and cultures. She uses flashcards to study, but making them takes a lot of time. Her flashcards often have an image of the particular art piece, as well as information about that piece such as the artist, date, and cultural time period.

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Flashcards for art pieces will need to allow images to be included on the flashcard. Additionally, it would be useful to be able to create flashcards quickly.

Watson the pre-med student

Watson relies on flashcards to memorize the sheer volume of information he is expected to know. For example, he uses flashcards to learn chemical structures for organic chemistry. He also uses them to prepare for tests, such as the MCAT. Oftentimes, Watson’s flashcards don’t need to carry very much information on them.

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Students who rely on flashcards for memorizing a lot of material need them to be quick and convenient. These students may also manipulate physical flashcards to use different organizational and learning tricks, so an electronic flashcard should be able to mirror these physical manipulations.

Task Analysis

Creating flashcards

In order to use flashcards, a user must first create and group their flashcards.

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We would also like to take advantage of the fact that our flashcards would be electronic. Because flashcards tend to fall into certain use cases, such as foreign language vocabulary, we can create templates that help optimize flashcard creation. Furthermore, we would like to be able to import flashcards from other sources; potential sources include Microsoft word files, spreadsheets, website tables, or other flashcard sources (such as Quizlet). Because flashcard creation on an Android may be inconvenient, we are also considering a web application that would allow the user to make flashcards. Finally, users should be able to send their flashcards to other users. Many of these ideas would require internet access.

Organizing flashcards

Users need to be able to sort their flashcards into sets to study.

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Useful features for helping the user decide which flashcards to study could include statistics, such as how often the user knows the information on the flashcard. Additionally, the user will want to be able to search through their flashcards, so a tagging system may be useful. Finally, if the flashcard sets are presented as files in a directory, the user should be able to manipulate the “files” in an intuitive way.

Using flashcards

Users want to use their flashcards to actually study them.

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