Mapping China
School of Information Management & Systems
B e r k e l e y


SIMS 213
User Interface Design and Development


Project Overview

Assign 1
project proposal

Assign 2
personas, goals, and task analysis

Assign 3
Scenarios, Comparative Analysis, and Initial Design

Assign 4
Low-fi Prototying & Usability Testing

Project Presentation (powerpoint file)


Assign 5
First Interactive Prototype

Assign 6
Project Heuristic Evaluation

Assign 7
Second Interactive Prototype

Assign 8
Pilot Usability Study

Assign 9
Third Interactive Prototype


Assignment 3: Scenarios, Comparative Analysis, and Initial Design

Initial Design by Pauletta Pan

from interviews that users main objectives with such a tool are related to

1. Trend-spotting (e.g. finding market opportunities for new technologies or solutions)

2. Tracking market/consumer behaviour (e.g. buyer spending habits)

3. Tracking industry behaviour (investment, industry consolidation, etc. – requires a search by industry)

4. Finding data to validate their own analyses or assertions

5. Research on specific news event or company.(search by keyword)

Users are therefore most interested in finding relationships between data, such as

• industry-related news

• company information, including relationships between companies (competition, partnerships, foreign affiliations, etc.)

• statistics (for a company within an industry, eg. market share, competitive position)

• news trends (how news stories relate to one another or to companies)

• networking opportunities within selected industry community.

Industry and keywords are search filters for locating articles or information. In some instances, such as looking for statistics at a certain time period, date is another delimiter. Industry, therefore, is the main commonality between most of the elements. Therefore, it would make sense to relate most of the other elements to Industry.

Concept 1
(original map-centric concept)

We originally thought that users might want to understand where the major hubs of development (e.g. new companies) and new stories were centered, and track those over time (hence the time-map). The map would allow one to zoom in to a region, municipality or city. Most important information (top anything: news stories, industry players, etc.) would be listed at the top with links to each item for more information.


The thought would be that for each element (news, company, etc.) the map would display different information. However, we determined that the map need not be as central to the application as we thought, and determined that another mapping schema (other than geographic maps) might be used. Is the application trying to do too much?


 

 

The interface becomes a large folder about the particular industry, with subfolders for each of the major types of information being sought (news, company info, government activity, market statistics, networking opportunities). The checkboxes represent the major sub-domains of the selected industry, and can be unchecked to filter content showed lower down in the page. It would be great to retrieve company profile information from a source like Yahoo! Finance. Some of the design details remain to be worked out.