Assignment Guidlines - Due: Thurs, Feb. 10

You will base this assignment on the project topic that your group chose. The key goal of this first assignment is to deeply understand the problem space, its set of pertinent users, and the issues and constraints that are involved in the problem. Who are the potential users? What tasks do they seek to perform? What functionality should the system provide? Basically, you are setting up a set of constraints for your subsequent design and gathering an understanding of the users and their current tasks. This then informs the requirements for the design. For this assignment you will first perform two requirements gathering activity, as discussed in class:

* Interact with 5 potential users, with an interview, questionnaire, or observation that you design
* Perform data gathering not involving contact with users, such as finding existing information on potential users, gathering lists of competing products, critiquing one particular competing product, etc.

You will then create a document with the following information:

* A description of how you gathered your data, and what you learned
* List of user characteristics based on the data you gathered
* 1 persona based on these user characteristics you identified
* Description of the environment relevant to the topic (physical, technical, social) that you learned
* Description of what you learned of the current activities of users, including current problems users have with existing methods or systems
* 1 scenario describing the current activities
* A structured task analysis of one of the current activities based on the data you gathered
* Any important constraints you learned