Work Distribution/
Revised
Personas

Task
Scenarios

Competitive
Analysis

Initial Design Ideas: D. Mann

Initial Design Ideas: Brianna Bridger

Initial Design Ideas: Manolo Inskeep

Initial Design Ideas: Aymanna Holiday

February 24, 2004

Work Distribution Table

Revised Personas & Goals

[We added a new fourth paragraph to Aymanna's persona discription, in order to emphasize how users can take advantage of the system's traffic-prediction capabilities for different tasks. The added paragraph is in italics.]

Aymanna Holiday, 35, moved to Mountain View two months ago from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to take a high-tech job in San Jose. She’d never been to California before moving here, and she still feels like she’s on vacation in this strange and exciting region.

It usually takes her between 25 and 40 minutes to get from home to work along the route that Mapquest recommends; unpredictable rush-hour traffic levels cause this wide variability in commute times and this annoys her. As a newcomer she’s still smitten by the charms of the Bay Area so she hasn’t yet reached the level of irritation that her fellow commuters experience. But as time goes on her road-rage level is rising and she’s already looking for ways to reduce her traffic hassles. A few times she left home early to experiment with alternate routes, but each time these experiments just worsened matters, getting Aymanna to work nearly an hour after leaving home.

She starts work at 9 a.m., but traffic is less of a problem by the time she gets off, usually around 7 p.m. At that point, she can take the Mapquest route and almost always get home in 20 minutes, so she’s not really concerned about traffic information on the way home. Aymanna is still learning the ropes regarding Bay Area driving but she wants to look beyond the standard ways of doing things; she’s actively experimenting and playing around with new tools and methods for the purpose of making the morning commute less painful, even if that means she’ll lose time in the short term and arrive at work late a few times in the process.

Once in a while, Aymanna needs to make driving plans to unfamiliar regions of the Bay Area. A friend recommended a really good doctor to her; however, this doctor's office is in Hayward. When making her first appointment, Aymanna wants to know the optimal time for driving to Hayward on a weekday, so she can spend less time behind the wheel and so she doesn't need to take more time off work than absolutely necessary. Also, her co-workers sometimes invite her to join them for concerts at the Concord Pavilion. She wants to know beforehand whether she'll have time to go home and grab dinner first, or whether she will need to drive to Concord directly from work.

She has a PDA and she briefly toyed around with a GPS direction-finding application but she found it to be a lot of trouble and not very useful at all. She’s looked into some of the local online traffic-reporting services and sometimes she listens to the radio traffic reports while driving, but she doesn’t have much patience for these resources because they waste her time with a lot of information about traffic throughout the Bay Area when all she cares about is a very tiny subset of all that data: conditions along her potential routes to work.

Aymanna’s goals include:
• Avoid stress and hassles
• Maximize the efficiency of regular tasks and chores, without being completely anal and without devoting too much time and effort to planning
• Explore the Bay Area and make new friends
• Keep up-to-date with new time-saving technologies, without wasting too much time doing so