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GR1 - User and Task Analysis

User Analysis

Analyst’s Notebook (ANB) has an extremely wide range of users. The representative users that we interviewed are from the sectors of academia (MIT), industry (IBM), and military (U.S. Army), but all were working on problems related to government and international development. These problems include:

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The users emphasized that efficiency is the most important aspect of UI design for them. They complained that ANB's UI requires too many clicks and mouse movements to perform simple, common tasks. Users were very enthusiastic about the use of sliders (rather than buttons) to adjust parameters, such as time or resources. The overall movement is toward a more efficient, intuitive, slick design with primary emphasis on visualization. In other words, the ANB interface is shifting toward the younger class of users.

Task Analysis

With the back-end and database support provided by IBM, we will focus on designing effective ways to visualize data in a way that allows users to see relationships between large amounts of data efficiently. The user should be able to change the values of one datapoint, and see how that affects the entire visualization in a meaningful way. Our users have expressed a need for this to replace the tedious methods of querying and optimization that they currently use. Standard data visualization tools are available from open-source libraries such as processing.js. We will select a few visualization methods (e.g. web, map, graph) to focus on, geared toward understanding the data sets for WiFi in Africa. The users' main high-level tasks include:

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