Contextual Inquiries, Affinity Diagramming, Persona Generation, Oh My!

User Interface Design, Info 213, has a fair number of my fellow first years in attendance. Professor Tapan Parikh really wasted no time getting us to pitch ideas and form groups of 3-5 people. My group includes Naila al Khalawi, Sean Chen, Donghjuk Jung, and Chan Kim. Through contextual inquiries, diagramming our findings, and generating insights we came to ask the question:

How might we help people create efficient scheduling habits that integrates their work and life to achieve greater balance between the two?

Our proposal: To create an application which allows users to track their time so as to get a better view of how it is actually spent versus how they think it is spent. We think that having an overview of actual time spent would better help people make the necessary adjustments to balance out and schedule their activities.

Grad student showing us where and how he schedules his time.

Planning habits of one of our interviewees.

Various perspectives drawn out in work models on the work and life of a technology worker:

A cultural model depicting the various
social/cultural elements in the user's life.

A flow model depicting the breakdowns
that occur in everyday interactions.

A sequence model depicting a typical "day-in-the-life" of a developer
with the breakdowns which occur throughout.

Based on our findings we created storyboards to illustrate possible uses of our application:

A runner.

A student. 

An administrator.

A workaholic.