Assignment #1

Project Team
Problem Statement
Primary Users & Goals
Initial Design & Justification

Project Team

Problem Statement

Currently, multiple user communities - students, faculty, prospective students, potential employers, and the general public, utilize the SIMS web site as a means to access academic information at SIMS. Instead of addressing each audience individually, its layout and structure only support two broad user groups - internal (users attending SIMS) and external (users not attending SIMS). While the site contains a wealth of information, much of the power is lost because individuals cannot navigate or customize the contents to meet their needs. In the absence of these capabilities, people create their own methods for tracking relevant academic information, such as course web site locations and graduation requirements, outside the SIMS structure. This makes it difficult to establish a dialog between those who utilize SIMS' academic resources and those who provide them. We see utilizing a different interface model as a starting point for addressing these issues.

Primary Users & Goals

Core Users
1) Internal
Students utilize course information to stay up to date on their current classes and planning tool for future courses. They use course websites to monitor the syllabus, review announcements, and look over projects from previous classes. Course websites also offer valuable insight into the nature of a class and play a role when students are planning their academic course of study.

2) External
Prospective students use the academic portion of the website to gather information about the school and determine if it fits their educational needs. They review course offerings, graduation requirements, and degree tracks. Phil Walz, SIMS’ Director of Admissions and Student Affairs, serves as a liaison to prospective students helping them locate the appropriate SIMS resources. Since Phil was never a student at SIMS he uses the academic information to locate relevant course offerings and answer questions from prospective students.

How we will find participants
Our user community closely mirrors the SIMS community, which will make access to users convenient. Below, we have described our plan and purpose for identifying key members of each user group:

1) Students—The SIMS’ student body uses course information in a variety of ways. In order to capture the most accurate representation of the variety of users we have identified characteristics that distinguish between user types. Initially, we plan to conduct interviews with students representing each of the categories below:

• Technical vs. Non-technical predisposition
• Recent undergraduate work vs. considerable professional experience
• Came to SIMS with specific professional development goals vs. more exploratory approach

2) Prospective Students – They are users without much prior knowledge of the SIMS body of information or the vocabulary common to information management. Since one prospective student may not be representative of the entire body of prospective students, Phil will serve as a valuable resource in understanding the types of information prospective students seek. Wherever actual prospective student input is needed, we will ask current students to reflect on their prior experience.

Initial Design & Justification

We propose an information-centric design that allows users to access course information based on their interests at SIMS. Our interface has three primary goals: 1) Simplify access to frequently used course resources. 2) Provide mechanisms for communicating deadlines and critical dates. 3) Simplify presentation of course resources. We anticipate meeting these goals with an interface that has two basic components:

Customized Home Page
Each student could designate their preferences and create a customized home page that would centralize their academic information. Preferences would be set up in advance and could be used to alert users that new information on a topic of interest to them is available.

Steve is the final semester of his second year busy with work from IS213. He does not want to forget the deadlines for graduation, so he adds an announcements module to his homepage that alerts him to upcoming deadlines.

Topical Exploration
The other component of the interface will focus on the organization of SIMS academic information. Prospective and current students use the SIMS’ website to identify course resources available in a specific area, such as Technology Policy. Navigating for a topic will reveal any relevant academic information at SIMS including courses or events. We anticipate the most challenging aspect of this interface will be organizing topics in a meaningful way. This aspect of the interface is part of our masters’ final project and may not be incorporated into our IS213 project.

For instance, Johanna is a new student at SIMS interested in User Interface Design. She wants to discover what resources are available (e.g. reading lists, websites) to her.