Scenarios
Overview
We adapted the scenarios in this milestone to better meet our clients needs and the direction that the group has decided to pursue. Our group thoroughly discussed the possible ways of organizing our scenarios and how to get the most use out of them. We found difficulty attempting to organize and write our scenarios due to the order of the milestones and the decisions they required us to make. More specifically, the Lo-Fi prototype required that we narrow our scope, also requested by our client, in which we decided to focus on the Diane persona. We did not want to write numerous scenarios for only Diane, but wanted to broaden the scenarios to other users and their motivations and goals. The other issue is that the Lo-Fi prototype also painted a specific interface in our minds that would have constrained our scenarios, which is something that Cooper et al (2007) warn us about. So, to force the team to gain a new and fresh perspective for the scenarios (and the Hi-Fi prototype), we created scenarios for potential viewers, similar to Diane, of Gallery sites that would belong to our three personas, John Shepperd, Jennifer Dobkin, and Simon White. We also purposefully stayed away from details relating to how the interface works as suggested by Cooper et al (2007).
There is another reason why our team chose to create our scenarios in this way and stay away from interface details, which was based on our client feedback about our personas and Lo-Fi prototype. Our client recently went to a Gallery developer gathering in Mountain View and reported that the developers paid close attention to the personas and found them extremely useful. The Lo-Fi prototype was not perceived as useful. Our team believes that the Gallery developers will find our scenarios very useful and informative as long as we refrain from incorporating interface details.
Scenarios
- A Shared Social Setting
- Browsing the Work of Your Peers
- A Technology for Professional Use
- Staying Connected with Family
A Shared Social Setting
Naomi Kruchevski is a friend and former coworker of Jennifer Dobkin. Naomi is just getting back to work from lunch, out on the east coast, it is 1pm and she logs into iChat. She sees Jennifer is online and starts a conversation with Jennifer about her recent marriage. The conversation is a bubbly account of Jennifer’s wedding, which Naomi unfortunately missed because she works on the other side of the country now. Over the course of the communiqué, Jennifer mentions that her dress was a fashionable item picked up on-the-cheap during her trip to Paris. Naomi insists on a picture of it, being obsessed with French design as she is.
Jennifer sends a link to a picture on her gallery site via iChat. Naomi follows the link, but to her dismay she cannot access the picture. Confused, Naomi messages Jennifer and suggests that maybe it would work in Firebox. Jennifer realizes what has happened – Naomi does not have access to albums that are restricted to family members only, and she smiles at Naomi’s suggestion. Jennifer allows access to the album for Naomi’s account and tells her to try again.
Success! Naomi peruses the pictures, while doing so she flags the ones that best show the rare and beautiful wedding dress so that she can access them later (Naomi is a high-fashion freak and collects images such as these). While browsing, she also comments upon certain pictures: the kiss-the-bride photo is met with a comment “SOOOO SWEET!” the first-piece-of-cake picture is commented “Omg can’t believe I missed this!” and a final photo of the bride and groom sharing a moment is met with “Perfect! Fortune and grace smile upon you!”
Naomi peruses the gallery, browsing various albums. She returns to iChat and mentions that “wow I had no idea people were actually uploading pictures to our shared ‘five star fashion’ album. Jennifer writes back “you know you can set up alerts that tell you when photos are added.” Naomi wonders ‘how?’ but decides not to ask because she is tired of Jennifer always knowing more than her about these technical things. Instead she navigates to her notification page. No luck. Then she spots an icon labeled Settings and clicks on it.
Aha! Naomi sets up her account to inform her by email whenever a new photo is added to the pool. She also tweaks her notification settings so that new pictures with the tag ‘fashion’ or ‘design’ appear in her notification menu, but not in her email box.
Excited by the experience, Naomi returns to chat and small talks with Jennifer for a time. Naomi decides to upload a few new items to the shared “five star fashion album” and tells Jennifer to check it out. After all this, Naomi exports the entire ‘five-star’ album to iPhoto and sets these pictures as a screensaver.
Browsing the Work of Your Peers
As a travel columnist at a university newspaper, Francis spends a lot of time hunting for pictures. To her, a good photograph is the mainstay of a travel piece and gives her lots of inspiration. Based on her experience writing columns over the course of two years and on personal enthusiasm for photography, Francis acquired a good sense of discovering pictures. From this job, she got to know the members of photo enthusiasts’ group on campus. She checks their web albums regularly to stay in touch with this circle and she gets good column pictures from time to time. John Shepperd’s Gallery site is one of her favorites.
It is Monday morning after fall break. Francis is working with a cup of coffee. As usual she opens her work-related email and there is a notification that John Shepperd created a new album with 47 pictures called “Niagara Falls 2008″.
Following the link in email, she reaches the album page directly. For such landscape pictures, it is hard to tell the quality from thumbnails, so she switches to another view type which has pictures lined up with the center slide magnified.
Before long, she is attracted by a picture which captured the waterfall with its spray reflected in the morning sunshine, quiet but breath-taking. “Gorgeous!” She murmured to herself and could not stop showing her appreciation. When she clicks into comments she finds that several peers had already said something, “Great light!” “Dude, you must’ve waited for two hours to get this shot!” “I missed this scope when I was there last year.” She smiled and typed in “Perfect moment!”
She quickly realized what she needs for this week’s column, but she needs to get John’s approve first. She sends him an in-site message without going back to her email box.
Five minutes later she got John’s reply. He was glad to let her use the picture and he also referred her to another album named “Through my eyes” where he keeps his favorite landscape photographs. She found the album with ease through a hyperlink labeled by the album’s name. She liked this album a lot and subscribed it so that she wouldn’t miss any updates.
A Technology for Professional Use
The Law School at the Kansas State University is celebrating 150 years of history and traditions of professional excellence. Joel Brown, the Director of Law School’s outreach programs, is in charge of developing the school’s institutional memory for the alumni through the creation of photo-rich website. The project is envisioned to provide access to thousands of historical photos covering themes such as “the class of the 1947” or “photos depicting the life of a faculty member” or “the life of the first woman to study Law at the school.” He has invited open tenders for this project.
Simon comes to know about this business opportunity, and wants to convince Joel Brown that he has the required capabilities to develop such a site for the school. Simon creates a special demo site for Joel and sends him an email with a link that allows him to browse a sample album. After receiving an email from Simon, Joel reviews this sample album on the basis of specific parameters and features that he has envisioned for the law school photo site to support:
While visiting Simon’s portfolio, one of the first things Joel wants to assess is whether viewers can see and enter supplementary information about each photo. He envisions this supplementary information to convey the historical date the picture was taken, the specific location within the law school building where the photo was taken, and possibly a small description (or a region tag) about each person in the photo. Joel envisions that grandchildren of the people who studied at the law school or other accomplished academics will be the kind of people who would want to read or enter this information on the site. When he visits Simon’s portfolio he searches for an easy way to read such information about pictures. At first, Joel struggles, but soon he finds a link to this information. After reading through some information, Joel tries to enter some more information, and discovers that a viewer cannot enter any more information. he feels disappointed! He also feels that although some supplementary information is present, it is not engaging or inviting to the reader. Joel takes a note of this point and starts exploring further.
After spending some time on the album, he wants to access one of the recently seen photos once again. Joel tries, but to his dismay, after struggling for some time, he is not able to locate the same photo. Joel takes a note of this too, and feels that Gallery might not provide necessary feature of bookmarking for the website viewers.
Staying Connected with Family
Diane loves waking up on Saturday mornings, making some coffee and checking her email. She checks her personal email 3 or 4 times a week, but usually checks it every Saturday. It’s around 9:45 am and Diane logs into her email account and notices she has received a couple emails from her son, Ryan, who is living in Seattle, Washington going to school at the University of Washington. The emails are notifications from Ryan’s Gallery site stating that he has uploaded new pictures to his site for people to see. Diane loves receiving notifications about new pictures that Ryan has uploaded, because it makes her feel that she is connected with Ryan despite living 8 hours away.
Diane then goes to her sons site and logs in to view the latest album Ryan has uploaded and notices in her notification feed that he has uploaded a new album called “Washington vs. Boise State” which has 25 photos. Diane directly jumps to viewing the images in that album. There are so many pictures in Ryan’s football album that Diane struggles to find the best way to view them all and browse the album. Diane notices a very interesting picture of Ryan waving a flag in the crowd, which reminded her of when he was little boy watching sports on TV. Diane found this picture so interesting and cute that she wanted to share it and engage her sisters in California in a dialogue around this picture as if they were sitting next her and they were looking at a physical photo album together. Diane quickly sends her sister, Alexis, the image to get the conversation started. Diane also prints a copy for herself so she can put it on her desk at work to share the picture with her coworkers.
Diane comments on the picture of Ryan waving a flag saying, “You use to cheer and shake your flag when you would watch football on TV,” to let Ryan know what the picture reminded her of and what it made her feel. While writing that comment it dawned on her that she had a picture of him watching football on TV cheering with a flag on her computer. Diane thought Ryan might find this picture somewhat embarrassing, but cute and decided to upload to Ryan’s football album anyway.
Ryan then receives a notification that a picture has been uploaded to his album. Ryan logins and sees in the notification feed that his Mother had uploaded an image to his football album and commented on one of his pictures. Ryan jumps directly to the picture his Mother uploaded and realized what an embarrassing picture she had posted, so he quickly changes the permissions so that only his family can see the image, rather than everybody, such as his friends. Ryan also reads the comment his Mother posted and wants to let her know that he has read it, so he comments on the image as well.
After Diane uploaded that image of Ryan, she started browsing more of his albums and was surprised to see tons of albums that her son didn’t tell her about. So, Diane chooses to be notified about when Ryan uploads pictures to his other albums.