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We found that most people spent little time sitting at their desks and, therefore, capturing news was a higher priority than watching news live. In fact, one obstacle that people described was not being able to watch broadcast news at a certain time due to other commitments. Our interviewees also mentioned the difficulty involved in catching up on the news after a business trip. They often gave up on this task as there simply wasnt time to review past news. We discovered that general news was not, in most cases, time critical. Time critical information was supplied by more specialized sources. People did not need to know about general news the minute it was captured.
We found that the type of news that people watched for their jobs did not change frequently. For example, people in advertising typically had several fields of expertise that did not change. They wouldnt suddenly switch from working in the food division to working in the automobile division. This implied to us that people would be more likely to spend a little more time constructing and refining filters for capturing the news they needed as these filters would be used for a long period of time.
The biggest obstacle for users was having to go to many different sources to look for news and finding the time to do so. Finding the news, given a source and time to look, was a relatively easy task. Users either scanned for particular sections in magazines or newspapers, listened or watched news broadcasts at a certain time, or just scanned for particular words in news publications that were signals of possible articles they should read. Users were pretty certain that they didnt miss any news of interest, assuming they had the time to look.
We had considered putting together a filing system within the program to allow people to categorize the captured news in ways that facilitated retrieval. However, we found that people used unique filing systems. Some were based on categories storing everything about a certain category together. Some used dates to organize their files. The majority of users wanted to integrate information from many sources and many also wanted to use hard copy for filing. We found that people wanted to share portions of the news they captured with others in and outside of their company. This led us to prioritize exporting news stories to existing file managers, rather than developing a complex filing mechanism within the product.
In summary, our initial work allowed the product team to prioritize the needed functionality. We knew that we could eliminate developing an elaborate filing system and that users were more interesting in capturing information than in watching it live. We knew that users were not particularly interested in being alerted when news was captured but that they wanted to immediately see how much had been captured whenever they went to look. We also knew that we had to make the process of defining filters to capture the news easy and give users enough feedback to refine these filters. As the type of information people looked for did not change frequently, we were encouraged that they could see the benefits of taking time to explicitly define filters that could be used for an extended period of time.
Requirements work produced these user goals (among others):
5.3. PRODUCT DESIGN
Once the team has agreed upon the goals that the product will support, it is time to begin product design. We use two portions of the data for the beginning of product design: goals that the product will support and the actions and objects needed to support those goals. Our framework allows designers to construct design possibilities based on the goals, actions, and objects that have been collected. This information helps us decide what type of metaphor, if any, would be useful in conveying the supported functionality to our users. We use the user and customer goals and the actions and objects currently identified to help in the evaluation of metaphors or design ideas. How well does a suggested design indicate support of the required goals? How well can we represent the actions and objects needed within a particular design? While Systematic Creativity doesnt give an easy answer for what the design should be, the framework facilitates brainstorming and decision making with all the collected information laid out. We think this allows better first cuts at design. Once we have come up with some viable alternatives, we can solicit user input via low-fidelity prototypes. This is merely a task of bringing in users and asking them to speculate on what a product will do given the opening screen (our low-fidelity prototype). We keep track of what functionality they correctly identify as well as any functionality they identify that we dont plan to support.
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