Assignment 1: Project Proposal

I. Team Members and Primary Skills

II. Problem Statement

New textbooks for SIMS courses are costly, and textbook buyback services do not offer much money for used books. Many SIMS students have textbooks from previous classes that they would like to sell, but they do not currently have an easy way to connect with potential buyers. Sellers may email class lists to attempt to find a buyer; sellers may solicit upperclassmen who may or may not have books to sell. This method is annoying and not highly effective since the majority of email recipients are not interested in either buying or selling.

We propose to design an online book exchange interface for SIMS students to buy or sell used textbooks and class materials. For project purposes, we plan to focus the system on the SIMS community. If expanded, this project could be used to serve the entire Berkeley community. This system will exist to put buyers and sellers in touch with each other; it will not facilitate on-line auctions or currency exchange. We plan to have our site linked from a portal page such as Simians or the SIMS departmental page.

III. Characteristics of Primary Users and their Goals

Users of the book exchange will be current and former SIMS students, other students taking SIMS courses, and SIMS faculty and staff. Given the SIMS student profile, we can expect users to be familiar with the Web and collaborative information systems such as message boards, email, and listservs.

Users will fit into two categories: sellers and buyers. The goal of the seller is to easily and quickly post the books s/he wishes to sell. The goal of the buyer is to find appropriate books and have an easy way to contact the seller to arrange the transaction. The ultimate goal of the seller is to sell his/her books at a higher price than that offered by the bookstore’s buyback program; the ultimate goal of the buyer is to purchase books at a lower price than that of the bookstore. Our project will facilitate sale of the books at the optimum price point.

IV. Participants

We will cull our participants from SIMS first and second year students. These subjects should be ideal because they reflect the future users of our system.

V. Initial Suggestions

We plan to spend the majority of our time on the user interface of the book exchange. We plan to use basic HTML forms with a simplified Perl/CGI back-end. If we encounter difficulty with the back-end, we will create dummy data to allow interface interaction. The full implementation may lead to a possible final project.

"Initial Improvements" does not apply to our project because we are starting from scratch; however, we plan to look at existing informal exchange sites to note good features to borrow and bad features to avoid.

One problem with email - the existing method of exchange - is that buy requests and sell requests reach far beyond the target audience. The exchange will focus on the particular needs of students. Our interface will aggregate common requests and organize the information in a useful way: by class, by book, etc. The system will also help to reduce the overload of listserv email currently received by all SIMS students.

We plan to implement four main features in our interface: