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Revised User Analysis:
Person A
Female Amy is a female college student who regularly goes online to check her facebook and see what her friends are doing. She generally likes to throw events every weekend at her apartment with friends. Uses email and facebook events to schedule events. She makes these online events at around the middle of the week (about 3 days prior to the event.) Overall she always has intended people to invite. On rarer occasions she might meet someone new and invite them over. The people she invites might also have their friends come over, so sometimes there are more people that she has invited.
Problems
No one Rarely anyone ever confirms her invites. Has Amy's invites online. She doesn't know who is coming. The number often varies since sometimes people can't attend or friends of friends are invited. She usually has to call people the day of the event in order to get confirmations and a better number of who is attending.
Person B
Mom scheduling for her kidsBonnie is a mom who has to do all of the scheduling for her young pre-teen kids. She rarely gets on the internet, but she does have a smart phone. Bonnie is not very tech savvy but her older teenage kids sometimes show her how to install apps for her phone. She keeps a schedule on a paper calendar and has to manually erase/update them for upcoming and changing events. These events can range from medical appointments to play dates with other kids.
Problems
Person C
Bonnie has difficulties keeping track of events for the kids since they are all written on paper. If this paper calendar gets lost, then she loses all of the events. Bonnie also realizes that she has to schedule events for her kids AND herself. If she decides to have another baby then she will have to schedule more and more. The paper can only hold so much. She also hates it when someone reschedules because she has to erase or scratch out previous events and make new ones. Sometimes she also forgets that her kid has a checkup with the dentist since she doesn't always look at the calendar.
Person C
Charlie is a course 14 tutor Tutor trying to create and maintain a schedule with initially a large number of openings. Tutor . He is an MIT student and is very tech savvy. Charlie wants to limit individual tutorees for only one hour a day and make sure they don't take up any more time. Slots . His process for tutoring is leaving a blank paper with certain times that are blank for users to sign their name to take up a spot. Charlie wants to make sure that this signup process is first come first serve.
Problems
Charlie is an MIT student... meaning he doesn't have time to deal with rescheduling and has only certain times to tutor someone. Slots can change instantly and need to somehow update the prospective tutorees of new openings. People can also be devious (or try to maximize their utility of the tutoring system) and end up erasing names on the paper to fill theirs in. People can also just not end up showing to a time slot or won't notify Charlie that they can't attend.
Person D
Daniel is a big time executive in Bitdiddle Co. He travels from country to country, state to state, city to city frequently. He likes being organized because he knows that any slip up can be terrible for his company. He likes using mobile applications because he doesn't have time to use a laptop when he's on the road or the air. He frequently uses mobile apps for different airlines and constantly checks emails. He also uses his companies mobile calendar in order to work with scheduling.
Problems
Daniel User has difficulty keeping up with changes in plans because their are so many other things going on at once. Some meetings end up getting postponed. This leads to events being pushed back repeatedly until a meeting is forced because it is the last possible time to meet. Daniel has troubles with getting the best user experience from the company mobile calendar since it was developed by two IT guys in the company. IT people aren't engineers. He needs to quickly make changes and find the next best times to reschedule.
Justifications:
Going Mobile: All of our classes can be benefited by some sort of notification system. We think that a mobile solution (text message, in-app push notification) can be more effective than an email. People tend to batch emails, making them less real-time and more prone to being lost or delayed. A mobile notification requires quick feedback from a user. This encourages users to have a more engaged interaction with the event.
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Subtasks: Specify range of acceptable times; Specify the expected duration of the event;
Motivation: A common theme among our user classes is that scheduling events is a difficult problem. In order for our solution to be effective, it needs to allow users the ability to tell us when and what they wish to schedule.
Invite
Pre-condition: Need to have an event;
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Subtasks: Set notification reminder interval; Add people to the event;
Motivation: Another common theme among our user classes is that coordinating a meeting time for a group of people is hard. Thus, mashcal needs to allow users to invite people to an event.
Respond
Pre-condition: Need to be invited to an event;
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Subtasks: Accept/Decline event; Choose from available time slots;
Motivation: The main problem we identified was how difficult it is to get confirmations from invitees (it is why we are going mobile). As such, we need to make it frictionless for invitees to accept/decline an event, and say what times are good for them.