IS 213: UI Design and Development
Spring, 2001
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Professor Marti Hearst

 

 

Problem Statement
Team Management Structure
Competitive Analysis
Methods

Personas and Goals
  Evan: Business Traveler
  Savanah: Leisure Traveler
  Charley: Adventure Traveler

Scenarios
  Evan: Buys a Guide
  Savanah: Starts a Guide
  Charley: Edits a Guide

Initial Design Ideas
  Ella v 1.0
  Billie v 1.0

Low-fidelity Prototype
  Evaluation:
  Methods & Measures
  Results & Discussion

First Interactive Prototype
  Revised Design

  Prototype Overview
  Storyboards
  Evaluation Instructions
  Midterm presentation (PPT)

Second Interactive Prototype

Usability Test
  Results
  Discussion
  Formal Experiment Design

Final Report
  Storyboard
  Final presentation (ppt)

Task Matrix
Travelite Vocabulary
Participation Matrix

Heuristic Evaluation
(Reading Tree Prototype)

Appendices

 

Sacha Pearson
Kim Garrett
Jennifer English

Contact Travelite

Problem Statement
TraveLite is a web-based, customized travel guide publisher. It allows travelers to sort through a database of travel content and choose only what they decide they need or want. Through a series of tasks, users create a customized guide, which they can later download to a PDA or other portable electronic format. In creating guides based on their interests and needs, travelers will have the opportunity to purchase their guide, rather than a static, bland product designed for a generalized perception of what a generic traveler in a region may need. The system will also allow users to store personalized guides in an account on TraveLite to later further modify and purchase the guide. One of the major design hurdles for the project, however, is how to support user queries over the vast amount of travel information that is available.

Characteristics of Primary User

TraveLite is expected to sell to 'Net savvy travelers who are interested in a slimmed-down convenient version of a travel guide. Rather than load down a backpack with a standard travel guide, these travelers can tote a guidebook of their own creation based on their specific interests and needs. In a focus group (conducted in October 2000) consisting of these 'net savvy frequent travelers, all participants said they already travel with their personal digital assistants because they contain their address and schedule information.

Veteran travelers strive to pack only the barest of necessities when they travel. They have complained in the past about purchasing heavy guidebooks that either provide a great deal more information than they need or else do not cover the precise destinations they plan to visit, necessitating the purchase of more than one guide. For example, an individual traveling to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for a month would have to purchase a guide to each of these countries. Creative travelers have learned to slice and dice the physical book and leave the unnecessary pages at home, or else simply bring only one book and hope to trade or purchase the others on the road.

By providing customizable guidebooks for download to hand held computers, TraveLite will solve both of these problems: heavy guidebooks with excess information and guidebooks that do not contain all the information needed for a trip. Our contention is that this increased use of handheld computers and familiarity of digitized information on the Internet will intersect in travelers who will, as a population, quickly realize the advantage and convenience of storing personalized travel information on hand held computing devices.

Project Scope


The scope of the project for this course is to complete the Web interface to the TraveLite product. This interface will help the user to browse and choose which travel content to include in their guide, save guides in progress, reopen and edit guides and purchase guides for download to a portable format. Purchased guides can also be saved for later changes and content updates.


Original problem statement