Scope: Human-Computer Interaction Project
 by Andrew Jackson, Joey Jezioro, Abhijeet Jhala, Aaron Kaluszka
Interview Excerpt - Business Professional
Description
Our target market is broad enough to cover nearly every working professional in the market. Anyone that keeps track of large amounts of vital correspondence, appointments, and serious to-do lists could benefit from scope, so, interviewing a busy, time-crunched professional seemed natural.

Artifact
Questions about the general background of the interviewee
  • What kinds of computer applications do you use?
    • Web editing software, email clients, web browsers, photo/graphic editing software, text editors, database management software.
  • How do you primarily use the computer?
    • Work.
  • What day-to-day activities you are usually engaged in?
    • Correspondence -(email), balancing checkbook, reading news, searching for info., creating and updating websites.
  • Are you comfortable with the services that are provided to you by your software?
    • Yes
  • Are you having troubles managing or synchronizing your activities, schedules, appointments, pending tasks and other notifications at the same time?
    • No
Specific points which we want to know that might help in analyzing user needs
  • Have you ever missed an important mail, appointment, to-do task, or important notification in your work schedule? If so, what was the reason behind it?
    • May have missed an email once or twice. Mostly due to being distracted by other items and receiving several email messages at once and having one with a sent or received date that placed it earlier in the week and therefore was obscured somewhat.
  • If you have very short computer access time and have to check all your important tasks what would you usually prefer to check and do at that point of time?
    • Email
  • Are you able to manage all your tasks easily and systematically?
    • Yes
  • Do you require your software to notify you of scheduled tasks or other information? If yes, what methods of notification would you have in mind?
    • Other information; software that monitors other servers and applications (modem usage, bandwidth usage, server status, etc). Graphical representation is useful; as is having an email alert or a pager notify someone when a server fails.
  • How important is visual interface to you in any notification system software? Would text notification or graphical notification attract you more?
    • A visual interface would be fairly important if it displayed information in a meaningful manner. Graphical notification would stand out more.
  • Do you current have or would you like notification software that would alert you about all of your emails, messages, pending tasks, news, and appointments, and most importantly, prioritize these tasks for you?
    • No.
  • When software notifies you of something, is it usually more useful to your productivity or detrimental? Give examples if possible.
    • Usually more useful. In the case of email, the client can check and notify me when there is a new message without my having to hit the 'send/receive' button on a regular basis. When a server or critical application fails, it is good to receive notification ASAP so the problem can hopefully be resolved before it affects more customers.
Specific things which we want to know which would interest us in evaluating our product
  • Do you have problems facing too many alerts and notifications from different programs informing about your pending tasks?
    • No.
  • Are there any means by which you can set priorities to your tasks? If so, can you get notified according to the priority of your work?
    • No
  • If not, would you be interested in getting a product that runs all the time, keeping you up to date with all your pending tasks according to your preferred priority?
    • No
  • What technical aspects would you expect from such a notification system?
    • Low resource consumption, stability, does not interfere with other applications and does not compromise security/privacy.
  • Assume you were given a highly interactive, compact, easy to use, graphical notification system that monitors all of your tasks and alerts and set priorities for you, so that just by glancing at it you can decide what to do next. Would you be willing to change from your usual notifications systems and take time to learn this new software and use it?
    • Unsure, would be willing to try.