Assignment 1

Project Name

FAST is an acronym which stands for Faculty Advancement Support Technology.  It will be designed to replace the current paper report entitled the Annual Supplement to the Bio-Bibliography (or Bio-Bib), which has a putatively negative word association with the faculty.

Proposed Project Members

Problem Statement

Currently at UC Berkeley, ladder-rank faculty annually submit a paper report documenting their efforts and achievements for an academic year.  This report is an aggregation, distillation and reformatting of a large corpora of collected documents.  Because these reports are paper-based; the data is not reusable; further, data from previous years can not be inherited and must be reentered.

The report is currently considered both necessary for review purposes but also tedious and time-consuming.  Building an interface that could reduce effort and cost of producing this report would be a major service to the faculty. 

One obvious design solution is to make the form electronic. This would allow comprehensive data, such as professional society memberships, publication data and awards, to be inherited from previous years.  This could greatly reduce faculty effort to renter the data annually.

Another potential design solution would apply input data to multiple reports/documents.  Much of the data required in the Bio-Bib could also be applied to curriculum vitae, bibliographies, or on-line web pages.  Were the data to be reused for multiple purposes, its cost and could be diffused.

Characteristics and Goals of Primary Users

The primary users of FAST will be ladder-rank (tenure-track) faculty at UC Berkeley.  Given that the report is turned in annually, it would be far reaching to assume that expert FAST report writers exist in any significant quantity.  Thus, we will distinguish our users by comfort level and skill with computers.  The three categories will be novice, intermediate and expert computer users, each with their own skill set and goals.  Ultimately, they all wish to be respected by their peers and promoted.

The novice users primarily use a computer to complete forms and email.  Their goal is to ensure all questions have been completed accurately and they have not made a mistake.  They wish to understand the questions asked, their contexts and have an obvious place to input their answers.  This user will mostly use the computer for email or form completion, have little electronically stored data, and will type most of his/her answers by hand.  The novice will strongly desire to be walked through a process and not be lost; they will need consistent system feedback.  Alternate views of the same data may be confusing and scary.

Intermediate users have extensive use with computers and graphical interfaces but not necessarily complex programs.  Their goal is to complete a report quickly, desiring to increase their overall efficiency.  They may have some stored electronic data from which they will cut and paste into the report.  They will also have knowledge of graphical shortcuts and will want to format the report to allow it to look ‘sharp.’  Multiple views of the same data will be novel but potentially exciting.

Expert users will want to complete the form efficiently.  They will not wish to be constrained by a wizard but will want to have freedom to access the data field they are seeking.  They will want little or no redundant requests for input and the ability to import data from outside applications.  They will be comfortable with key stroke shortcuts and may even wish to export data.  Alternate views of the same data would be of strong interest.

Finding participants

Our current sponsor is the Office of the CIO for UC Berkeley with potential co-sponsorship from the Office of Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare.  Patti Owen, the Associate Vice-Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare has offered to find an academic department(s) with whom we can test our prototypes.

Alternate characteristic for users could revolve around their title.  Newer, assistant professors seeking to establish their tenure may have a stronger goal to more elaborately express their accomplishments in an effort to facilitate faster promotion.  Alternatively, more tenured faculty may simply wish to put minimal effort into completing the form because they have determined that it bears little impact on whether they are promoted—they just want to finish a rote assignment.