User Needs and Tasks

For the following assignment, our team has chosen to gather feedback on an “Olympic Sports Database” application. The purpose of the application will be to show interested users how many olympic medals were won by individual athletes, countries, and sports groups during the 2012 Olympic Sports in London. The application itself has two main functions- the first of which being to highlight medals won by a specific person/region, and the second being the ability to compare the olympic success of two unique search queries (e.g- comparing two side-by-side athletes, countries, or sports categories).

To begin our assignment, we first constructed a nine-question interview script to get a better idea of what user’s would like to see out of an Olympic Sports Application. Users are asked such questions like “How often do you look up information on prior Olympics?” for us to get a general idea of how much generated interest our application will create. Following this, we continue to ask questions such as: “What is one piece of information regarding the Olympics that you may like to know but is not typically listed,” in an effort to help us add some unique functionality to our application in the future. Three interviewees were selected from different professional backgrounds, and a summary of their sessions can be found below.

The first person we interviewed, Kristian Svendsen, was a very casual user. He does not care as much about the statistics of olympic games, really only looking them up to settle debates amongst his friends. Although he is not a sports stat fanatic, he still is interested in several statistics. While he uses google and olympic.com to find his information, Kristian mentions how he would be interested in seeing a total medal count and a list of age of the olympians. As a casual user, Kristian said he would not pay for such a service nor did he show interest in receiving email updates regarding Olympic events.

The next two people we interviewed were fans of sports statistics, saying that they often look up Olympic information. Both people expressed interest in paying for a service and receiving email updates about Olympic events. While they both used different websites to find their statistics, they also complained that detailed information regarding the teams and players were difficult to find. Although one was more interested in individual contestants while the other was intrigued by the country statistics, they both seemed to want a simpler method of finding information.

Our interview highlights two main types of personas. Because our site is dynamic with our information that we offer, we will attract different types of users for our site. The two personas for our site will be the casual user and the statistician user. Our casual user will use the site to get random information from the olympics. For example in our interview, Kristian, a junior in college, used the site to find out basketball olympics facts while having a debate with friends. He just went on the site to find quick information which helped him in his debate with his friends. On the other hand, Conner, also a student, collects information from past and recent olympics. He is more interested in the data he finds and is looking for a site in which he can easily find the information he needs. Finding a good site for the olympics is important to him. Our website will appeal to both personas because of the great amount of information we offer and the organization of our information.

To help better convey the general tasks each of our highlighted personas would attempt, we have constructed a user-task matrix, and task-matrices for each individual scenario:

As we can see through the following examples, the Olympic Medal database is a basic application that can provide users with unique information. It has the capability not only to allow casual users easy access to general olympic statistics (i.e.- medals won, athlete age, sport), but also gives advanced users the ability to compare specific metrics side-by-side in hopes of making educated predictions of future olympic results.

Interview Script:

  1. How often do you look up information on prior Olympics?
  2. Where is the first place you would think of looking for information on prior Olympics?
  3. The last time you looked up information on prior Olympics, where did you look?
  4. What is the most important information you would like to know about prior Olympics?
  5. What is one piece of information regarding the Olympics that you may like to know but is not typically listed?
  6. Are there any particular features you may like to have when looking at information on prior Olympics?
  7. Any additional comments?
  8. Would you pay for this information?
  9. Would you sign up to receive email updates on new Olympic information?

Raw Interview Data:

Responses transcribed via Google Docs. Link: https://docs.google.com/a/svendsenteam.com/spreadsheets/d/1R7LJGytdXRBAqkF2XLQAILp-DsfXrtrebM4OeKlDYtI/edit?usp=sharing