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Assignment 1Proposal Assignment
2Personas,
Goals Tasks Analysis
Assignment
3 Scenarios,
Comparative
Analysis,
and Initial
Designs Assignment
4 Low-fi
Prototyping&
Usability Testing Assignment 5First
Interactive Prototype Assignment
6Heuristic
EvaluationAssignment 7Second
Interactive Prototype Assignment
8Pilot
Usability Study Assignment 9Final
Write-Up Work
Distribution | Assignment
#2: Project Personas, Goals, and Task Analysis February 17, 2004 Team Management Structure
The concept of "Healthy Communities" first appeared in the World Health Organization Conference in 1986, when Len Duhl (professor of public health at UC Berkeley) spoke on the idea that the health of a community is like the health of an individual, and the two are interconnected closely. In this information age, we have seen patients increasingly becoming partners in their own health care, researching health information online and participating actively in clinical decisions with their providers. However, in the larger arena of public health, or community health, there is a lack of partnership and participation by the general public to improve community health. It is not that people don't care to improve the quality of life in their communities, but they lack the appropriate tools to become easily involved. For example, issues such as residential crime rate and releases of a toxin in a community affect our living conditions and environment, and can in turn affect our psychological and physiological health. What can ordinary citizens interested in improving community conditions do about these issues currently? Not much, since there is no easy way to get involved. Although professionals from areas such as public health, city planning, environmental planning, sanitation services, law enforcement, religion, and other fields work hard to improve community health, there is also a lack of coordination and sharing of information/resources among these professionals, making the effort even more difficult. What is needed is an information network that tracks community health issues, promotes sharing of community information and best practices, and supports tools to help people get involved in making community decisions. The Healthy Communities Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by two public health professors at UC Berkeley, has decided to build such an information system to meet the need. This system, the Healthy Communities Network System, will serve as a set of templates that can be built on and easily customized by local communities, so that each interested community can have its own version of the system while the underlying architecture remains centralized. The first community that has expressed an interest is Marin County, California, and we will build the first version of the system with customizations made for Marin County. Primary Users and Their Goals There are two levels of users for this system. The first level will be designers and administrators from communities interested in the system, and these designers/administrators can leverage and customize the system for individual community needs. The second level will be end users of the different community versions of the system. For our project, we will focus on the second level users of the Marin Conunty system version. These second level users will be the people or professionals who are interested in community health issues and there are tools available to help these people make, plan, and evaluate changes to improve community conditions and promote healthy lifestyle. The system will be internet-based, so that it is available for all those who have internet access, but we envision most of the end users will be people who want to improve community health, and the goal is that they can get involved with powerful tools to learn about community issues, voice concerns, promote changes, make more informed decisions, connect with other public health professionals, and implement interventions for their community. The Initial Design The Initial Design has three components: 1. A dashboard that provides indicators and news to alert people to
community health issues such as the increase or decrease in toxic releases
within a community, or a change in residential crime statistics. This
will increase local community health awareness. Explanation of Personas and Goals Development We developed personas both from our anticipation of how the system will be used by the users and from our interviews. We interviewed a total of 3 people including a community health professional, a public health student, and an ordinary resident. This small sample population of interviewees was created based on people/professionals who are interested in community health issue, and these people are from different social-economic-educational backgrounds. Our interview questioned how they feel about learning any health/life-style related issues of their community, what kinds of information they are interested in knowing, and their preferred ways of learning and improving the conditions of the community. The results of the interview indicate that our target users are very concerned or interested in learning about the “health” of their living environment, which can include environmental health, transportation infrastructure, recreational facility, healthcare, etc. One group of people interested in learning about a community are people who are new to the place and would like more information. We tried to create our personas to demonstrate how the system can benefit both new comers and current residents in a community. For newcomers, they may use the system mainly to get to know the community better. And for residents, they may use the system to improve the living quality of their community. We designed the interview to be focused on several features - indicators, poll, and contact database. These are features that would allow us to judge whether the proposed features will lead us to the ultimate goal the system as described in the Problem Statement. In addition, we also included a few “overall” questions in the survey, which would allow us to justify the idea of building such a system and to predict the popularity of the system among the target users.
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Nancy
is a master's public health student specializing in environmental
health and health policy. She is interested in examining how
interactions with environmental agents affect human health.
For her master's thesis, she is working on a research project
to better understand how children are exposed to prenatal/postnatal
pesticide and allergen exposures and what their health effects
are. As a result, she needs to get in touch with public health
officials regularly for school projects. Currently, she contacts
these public health professionals mostly through referrals
from professors and other students at school. 
Marcos
is 37 year's old, and was born and raised in Massachusetts. He moved
to Berkeley for his college since 1985 and got his M.D. in Public
Health Information Sciences from UC Berkeley. Marcos has been working
in the healthcare communication field for a few years in the Bay
Area. He moved back to Massachusetts last year and is currently
working as the director of computing resources at Harvard Medical
School. He is responsible for the management of high performance
computing infrastructure and resources to support research throughout
the medical school. 
Maurice
Law is a 32 year-old engineer from Hong Kong originally.
He received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in
Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis.
He is married to a UC Davis graduate also from Hong Kong and
is now a father of a 3 year's old boy, Morris. His wife is
now a stay home mom spending most of the time caring for their
little boy. Both of their families are still reside in Hong
Kong, and they try to go back every year to visit their parents.
Both his wife and Maurice enjoy the life style and living
environment here in the United States, and they plan to stay
permanently to raise their kids here. Maurice has been working
for a small local company in the Sacramento area as an engineer
upon graduation several years ago. After working for
the company for five years, he has decided that it is time to move
on to a bigger company where he could receive better benefits
and pay rate. He is recently being offered an opportunity
to work for a well-established engineering consulting company
near Oakland. He is very excited about this job offer, which
could mean an opportunity for US residency, and he is
moving to Oakland to be closer to his office.