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Assignment Two:

Project Management Structure

Revised Problem Statement

Explanation and Justification of Personas and Goals

Description of Personas and Goals

   Emily Kathryn • Addison Brooks • Grace Anderson • Gabriela Garcia-Marquez

Task Analysis

Work Distribution

Appendices

Project Management Structure

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Revised Problem Statement

Scheduling meeting times between many users is a tedious, inefficient process requiring numerous emails or phone calls. When one user has a conflict, the entire discussion must be regenerated, requiring each user to again assert his or her list of availabilities and conflicts. Among large groups of users, the number of iterations required can become unwieldy and irritating. Adding to the frustration, some invited attendees forget or neglect to respond to meeting requests in a timely manner. Additionally, every semester, professors must revisit the task of determining office hours while trying to incorporate personal and student schedules.

There is also the issue of existing calendaring programs, including Outlook, handheld PCs, annd others: SIMS has not and is unlikely to standardize on a common calendaring platform such as Outlook, nor is Berkeley likely to implement a centralized scheduling system. Moreover, when using scheduling programs, oftentimes inputting data is time-consuming and complicated by having too many options. Having to re-enter email information for people participating in a meeting can make the data tracking process even more tedious. Sometimes meetings are scheduled during holidays or during final exams because they are coordinated so far in advance. And when the results of possible meeting times are displayed, they tend to not be descriptive enough. Key information is misisng, such as people's names, the flexibility of time slots, and identification of people without whom a meeting cannot occur. Providing a streamlined web-based tool to automate the scheduling process would reduce the amount of effort and time required to organize a meeting, while providing an informative, easy-to-read display accessible to everyone in the SIMS community.

Explanation and Justification of Personas and Goals

The personas are based on composites of the interview results. In setting up the interview, we looked at the project scope and then identified the likely users of an appointment scheduling system. There were 4 categories of users we identified:

• Professors
• PhD students
• Masters students
• administrative staff

With the results of the interviews in hand, we created users that represented likely composites of the preferences expressed by the interviewees. We found that many people we interviewed has very busy calenders, as well as multiple calendars and that coordinating the different calendars was a real issue for them.

There were also multiple interfaces, with some people using character based email clients, and others using graphical clients. Interestingly enough, despite the high technical expertise of our interview population, none of them used PDA's, but at least one of them expressed a desire for one - but only if it had the full list of features such as WiFi, Bluetooth, keyboard as well as ease of use.

We created 4 personas, each representing each of the broad user categories we interviewed. The various personal goals were assigned to the category appropriate, and when there were goals and preferences that didn't seem tied to a particular category, they were assigned somewhat randomly.

All of the personas depend on a schedule, with a range from Addison being the intense and highly technical "power user" to Gabriela the non-technical and relatively relaxed user. In summary the personas are:

• Based on interviews of SIMS
• Interviews based on our original project and the expected user population
• Each persona is a montage of the various people we've interviewed
• Based on the different interfaces users requested (text, graphics)
• Personas represent the different populations we interviewed: Profs and grad students
  • Different users use exercise aspects of the interface
• We have one persona per type of interviewee (prof,staff, PhD and MIMS)
• Also included the non-SIMS related activities that many people like to have scheduled

Description of Personas and Goals

Persona #1 Emily Kathryn
52-year-old female professor focusing on Economics of Information

Nickname: Ms. Old School Command Line
Technology level: Varies
Interest in meeting scheduling: Average
Unique situation: Scheduling office hours to work with student's schedules

Emily is a professor in SIMS researching Network Economics, and co-directs the MOT Program. She is a veteran of UC Berkeley, where she received her BS in Mathematics, and PhD in Economics. Her life revolves around her successful career, she is often invited to lectures and interviews. So she has to coordinate many meetings with people outside of the department. To relax she stays at home alone and watches mindless TV action dramas, read books and take long luxurious bubble baths. When she travels, she likes to collect matchbooks from all the places she has visitted.

Emily has a lot of meetings, many of them are standing meetings sheduled early in the semester. She allocates time for her faculty meetings first and then posts a calendar outside her office with the remaing time slots for office hours signup. For ad-hoc meetings, Emily often makes phone calls if there is only one person to call; but when more people are involved, she prefers email. Emily uses Outlook, however she has to carry a paper calendar with her when she doesn’t have access to a computer, which results in several versions of calendars. She sometimes misses meeting times because of the lack of integration among the different versions.

Being a social scientist, Emily is not as computer savvy as many of her students and colleagues. She is not a programmer, but Emily is highly skilled in standard statistical software packages, such as SAS and SPSS and is comfortable with command lines. In many respects, she is something of a luddite - while research on technology is interesting to her, she does not have much personal interest in technological gadgets - it is only very recently that she acquired a cellphone - a very basic model, with an easy to use interface.

Goals:

• Get more funding for her research
• Have an integrated computerized scheduling system
  • Able to access it when away from office
  • Works with people outside of department
  • Be easy to use, so she can spend her time living her life, instead of organizing it

Justification:

• Composite of goals for professors interviewed
• Reflects their concerns
• Also made a little more extreme along the lines of focus on work to make problem more interesting
• Defined as a pseudo-Luddite to emphasize ease of use for busy professor

Persona #2 Addison Brooks
24-year-old male Master’s student in Information Management and SystemS

Nickname: Mr. Rupa Patel
Technology level: High
Interest in meeting scheduling: High
Unique situation: IMSA Executive role requires many types of meeting to be scheduled

Addison is a second year SIMS student looking forward to graduate this May. He was born and raised in San Jose. As a child, he fostered deep affection for the computer from his dad, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. When studying his fourth-year as an undergrad in Computer Science at Stanford, Addison learned about the SIMS program. He waited no time to apply, got admitted, and became a proud SIMian.

Addison is very social and knows every one at SIMS. He chairs the IMSA Fundraiser committee and has successfully organized several fundraising events during his term. He used to hold a part-time position as a DBA, but recently quit the job to focus on his final project. However, he still makes time to play networked action games.

To live up to his techie identity, Addison typically initiates meetings through emails and expects others to do the same. He prefers Linux over Windows, and often uses PINE to read email. However, he would love to have a powerful app that is easy to use for scheduling meetings. Addison mainly keeps his calendar using a day planner, but he also likes to mark down important meeting times on post-its and stick them on his monitor. He has been looking at PDA's, but wants one that does EVERYTHING, but is affordable and runs Linux.

Goals:

• Wrap up final project successfully and get a job
• Spend lots of quality time hanging around with friends and having a good time
• Stay on top of his IMSA responsibilities
• Impress his technie buddies with his really cool technology
• Organize busy social and academic life

Justification:

• Very similar to many people we know in the MIMS program
• Wanted a persona that needs to integrate social and academic activities, with lots of scheduling pressure
• Wanted someone to represent users who use a text based email client like PINE
• Highly technical power user

Persona #3 Grace Anderson
27-year-old female PhD student in Architecture

Nickname: Jane Average, run of the mill overachieving PhD student
Technology level: High, but Mac specific
Interest in meeting scheduling: Critical
Unique situation: High number of group projects create conflicting meeting time

Grace Anderson is in her first year of a PhD degree program in Architecture specializing in Post-Modern architecture, especially Frank Gehry and late 80's Los Angeles architecture. She grew up in San Francisco and then moved to the midwest. Although she like the midwest, she wanted to return to the Bay Area and she chose UC Berkeley for grad school.

She lives in the Berkeley Hills and her room has a fantastic view of the San Francisco Bay. Graces likes to hang out in the city with her friends. She's very passionate about her work and is very busy, which has overwhelmed her social life - she is anxious for summer, so that she can have a life again. She has 3 project groups that meet at irregular intervals, and coordinating the meetings is a daunting task. She also attends regular meetings with her PhD research team and with Prof Daniel Harris for whom she works as TA. Grace gives priority to Daniel’s meetings, and plans her schedule accordingly. She usually coordinates her private meetings by phone and school meetings via emails. However, after the group gets bigger, she cannot find an effective way to schedule meetings. To take a break from schoolwork, she sometimes surfs dating sites, dreaming of the ideal man. For relaxation and exercise, Grace does Chen style Taijiquan. She's an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

Grace is a hardcore Apple computer user and is really proficient with graphics packages. She uses Tiger Mail to control her email correspondence and iCal to keep track of her daily schedule. Grace is very Apple-centric and knows very little about PC's.

Goals:

• Want to get a fellowship to study abroad
• Eventually become a professor of architectural design theory
• Manage her school meeting times so that she can have a life again
• Be able to prioritize the meetings, giving preference to Professors

Justification:

• Represents a PhD candidate
• Arbitrarily chose one that has a calendar skewed heavily towards schoolwork
• Also represents the priority oriented aspects of our interview results
• Very dependent on calendar, but neither a Luddite nor a power user

Persona #4 Gabriela Garcia-Marquez
47-year-old famale SIMS Staff

Nickname: Go Go Gabby!
Technology level: Minimal
Interest in meeting scheduling: Average-High
Unique situation: Scheduling meetings with internal staff, faculty, and students as well as external Berkeley administrators

Gabriela is an administrator in SIMS. She has been working at SIMS for the past ten years. She is thoroughly familiar with the internal workings of SIMS and has established a system for setting up meetings. A few years ago, she was convinced to start using her Outlook calendar, which she uses regularly now, but only for ongoing, long-term meetings.

She keeps a big paper calendar where she pencils in meetings on a weekly basis. These change more frequently and are often scheduled ad-hoc. She'll usually glance at her online calendar, just to make sure there are no conflicts. This mostly works for her, except in really busy weeks where she ends up writing down meetings quickly on sticky notes and then comes back a few hours later and can't remember details about the appointment. Occasionally, she agrees to a meeting that conflicts with her schedule.

She prefers face to face interaction because she is a people person, but is never far from the phone or email. She uses programs that she is trained to use, but otherwise she doesn't try using anything new. She would be unlikely to take on new meeting scheduling systems unless she were told by a lot of other staff people that it was a good system.

She has cats and dogs at home and lives and dies for them. She has learned which websites will allow her to get to the animal pictures and toys for her pets that she wants to buy. She is notorious in the SIMS department for her vast collection of animal pictures and unusual knitted sweaters with pictures of dogs in the front of them. Next time you see her around South Hall, ask to see her animal socks, she has about 40 pairs of them. However, don't ask to see her underwear. Beware. She WILL show it to you!

Goals

• Be able to schedule meetings across different groups of people both inside and outside of SIMS
• Continue to use her Outlook calendar and big paper calendar without making too many mistakes
• Not get stressed out during busy weeks so that she doesn't schedule things and then forget what it was for
• To take care of her pets and acquire more of her interesting sweaters

Justification:

• Represents administrative staff that may use a calendar
• Arbitrarily selected as a person who is not as intense and overachieving
• Needs to use calendar, but not technical

Task Analysis

Work Distribution

The work distribution information for this assignment has been placed in a composite Work Distribution table to reflect the distribution of work for the entire VERN project.

Appendices

Between February 9, 2005 and February 11, 2005, VERN group members conducted 7 interviews. We interviewed a variety of users - 2 professors, 1 PhD, 1 Staff, 2 TA's/Students, and 1 Student. Our notes and transcriptions are found below in Anonymous Compiled Transcripts. A more useful summarized version is in Edited Transcripts.