(PGA) Use Cases (February 2013)

Liam (needs to improve focusing, shorter interaction sessions)

Background 

Liam is a 15 years old student at a secondary school in Seattle. He is extroverted and likes team sports: he plays in the school’s baseball team. Once he tried fencing, but it stretched Liam’s patience to the limit. He feels well running, jumping and playing with friends, and fencing was too quiet for him.

At school, Liam doesn’t enjoy much with humanities but loves scientific courses, such as maths or physics. At class, he likes doing tasks that involve physical motion and a practical approach to contents. Liam can’t stand theoretical classes, because frequently realizes that, though all his efforts, he has spent the time thinking about something else while the teacher was talking, and he’s lost the thread of the class.

Erie is Liam's History teacher, and she has a habit that has become really helpful for Liam: she uses to start her classes sharing a diagram with the contents of the current session, because she knows that sometimes can be hard for her students to follow all the events that can occur in a historic episode. Liam finds this amazing, because this allows him to pick up the thread much easier.

At the school, Liam uses computers frequently, because they are a supporting tool for a lot of activities. Liam’s School uses a Moodle platform, where students can find contents, quizzes and the course scheduling.

At home, he’s has a personal computer to do homework. Liam has an smartphone that uses frequently to chat with his school peers and friends. 

A typical day

Liam arrives at the school at 8 am. Today classes start with Social Studies, where students are working on a group project about Economics and Climate Change. They started this project one week ago, so now are in the research phase. Each of the students uses a computer to find information in diverse sources: Wikipedia, online newspapers or magazines, etc. Liam knows that he is easily distracted by advertising and secondary information, so he’s got a personal profile with a simplified layout (just one column per page) and simplified content (just the primary content). When he finds something relevant, he saves that page to Pocket (www.getpocket.com), in a profile shared with his peers. He usually tags the documents, but feels that tagging is not enough to remember key points and why he considered this article interesting, so while in Pocket he opens his annotation tool and writes some comments, adding that note to the saved page.

In the afternoon, he has Math class. He enjoys this subject because he’s very good at visualizing abstract ideas and giving them a concrete form. Liam uses to translate formulas into graphs, and his peers ask him for help when they find unable to understand something. His graphs have become so popular, that he captures them with his smartphone camera and shares them as notes attached to class contents in Moodle. At the end of the class, the teacher explains today’s Math homework will be on a 20 question quiz tomorrow.

Back at home, Liam switches on his personal computer and reviews the course schedule. He sees that he has an English exam next week, and doesn’t want to leave the studying for the last moment. To be sure to study a bit every day, he opens his personal scheduling tool and adds deadlines with alerts, to control his own learning pace. Liam uses alerts to avoid forgetting this kind of tasks.

Then Liam goes for the Math quiz from school’s Moodle, that gives 20 minutes to answer 20 questions. When he enters the quiz, a pop-up message appears in the computer's screen asking him to disable his smartphone sounds and alerts, and he confirms this action. He configured this option to appear each time he starts a new task in Moodle, because he didn't remember to do it manually, and he always ended distracted by his peers chatting. After the first 5 questions he feels fatigued and realizes that has begun losing his focus and will be unable to continue. He disables the quiz time control using a personal option that has been previously enabled for him by the teachers team, takes a relay and continues with the next questions.

Summary of Liam's needs
- shorter interaction sessions
- adapted learning pace 
- simplified layout (to avoid loss of attention)
- simplified content
- ability to take notes
- tools to reinforce contents memorizing
- personal scheduling with check options

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Liam's constellation:

Susan (needs to enhance visibility and simplify)

Background

Susan is a 60 years old and works as accountant half-time. She enjoys having free time after a busy life but she doesn't like being too quiet, so one month ago she enrolled an online course about Philosophy History. Studying Philosophy was an old dream, maybe to do something opposite to the concrete thinking of accountability.

Susan has a personal computer at home, and her sons gave her a touchscreen tablet as Christmas gift. She also has a tactile smartphone.

A typical day

After working, having lunch and go shopping, at the evening Susan is ready to start today's Philosophy session. Classes consist on video lectures complemented with reading (website pages or PDF provided by the lecturer). First Susan felt a bit uncomfortable with the computer because all looked too small and pages seemed overfilled. After searching a bit, her son discovered PGA and helped her to configure it. They set larger type size, larger interactables and increased screen contrast. They also activated an option that allow Susan to simplify the page layout just in case it was too confusing.

Susan and her son explored other options, and when discovered an annotation tool she told him to enable it too: taking notes on-the-fly and remember what each lesson is about might be helpful. 

Susan spends 2 hours studying. After dining, she wants to read a bit more before sleeping. She takes her tablet to the bed and activates a "night version" of her PGA's profile, with lower screen brightness and inverted screen contrast. This is how her husband can sleep while she's reading.

Summary of Susan's needs
- enhance visibility
- simplified layout
- larger interactables

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Susan's constellation: 

David (needs alternative to all visuals)

Background

David is a 16 years old student at a secondary school in Barcelona. He is eager to study Computer Science at the University, because enjoys all related to computers, specially logical thinking. At the school, he is part of a group of students that do some research with game programming. Of course, one of his favourite school courses is Technology but he also likes Maths, though when he was younger he needed assistance to read math documents. 

Two years ago, David's family moved to a new home a bit far from the school, so now he takes the tube daily. There are 5 stations from his home to the school, and he sometimes spends this time chatting with friends with his smartphone. 

David also likes swimming, and he's good at that. Indeed, he trains regularly and participates in regional championships, so some saturdays he travels with his parents to take part in competitions. He usually has a lot of homework, so if the trip is going to last more than one hour, he  makes the most of this time studying with his tablet, using a screen reader and narration for all visuals. 

Besides the smartphone and the tablet, David also has a laptop that shares with his sister, Laura, when at home, and sometimes carries to the school.  

A typical day

David starts school at 8:30 am. The day begins with a History exam that consists of 5 open-ended questions and 5 practices. The students can answer on paper or using their laptops, and David chooses doing the exam by computer, as usual. Yesterday Laura used the laptop to do some homework, so David log in PGA to enable all his preferences. He puts his headphones on to listen to the first question, and starts typing the answer. To be aware of the time available, he's set an alarm that each ten minutes notifies the time pending. 

After ending the 5 open-ended questions, David goes for the practices, that consists on diverse types of tests: dragging items to groups, linking related items in two columns,... PGA converts these practices into alternative interactions, so he can perform the test. 

The exam has gone well and David rushes to one of his favourite courses: Maths! All the school classes have a digital whiteboard, which is fantastic for David because he can save all teacher's writings in his laptop and use later to review the class at home. He uses text-to-speech for all text, that works also for handwritten text and for math expressions. 

To take notes in Maths class, David types literally formulas and expressions (e.g. "integral of..."), but this was really confusing to work in group with his peers. Lately he has enabled a preference that converts what he writes in symbols. This way he can share his documents with the class or deliver his work to the teacher. 

Travelling back at home, he spends some time chatting with his friends with his smartphone. At home he uses voice recognition to dictate his answers, but at the tube he doesn't want to disturb other passengers, so he puts headphones on and uses a customized keyboard with text-to-speech character prediction that allows him to type in the touchscreen. 

Summary of David's needs
- text-to-speech
- alternative to all visual information
- alternative to specific interactions (drag to..., etc.)

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

David's constellation:

Emma (needs alternative to all audio)

Background

Emma is a 22 years old student at The Open University, with a virtual campus. She's studying Art History. Using a virtual campus is really helpful for her because she lives in a small town far away from any phisical university.

A typical day

Emma takes her breakfast and starts studying contents of the Contemporary Art course. These materials consists on several videos, where the lecturer explains some of the main works of the last XX century art. In her computer, Emma has set a PGA profile that automatically enables captions for all videos, as well as transcription. Transcriptions are very useful for Emma, because she can save them and review its contents later.

After seeing the first video, Emma discovers that the second one doesn't have captions. She sends a request for a caption in English language, and continues stuying. All works well until she encounters another video that just contains a transcription in French. She doesn't know French but has a friend that does, so she sends her the french transcript. She could have sent a new request, but she's glad to contribute in course contents' improvement. She did so in another occasion, and saw that the process is easy.

At the end of the lesson the lecturer has left some homework that consists on a quizz for autoevaluation. She must perform various kinds of activities: sometimes are open-ended questions, others are dragging items to make relationships... In the latter, she sees an alert that indicates her if the item was correctly dragged. When she started the course, some quizzes were confusing for her because she missed the feedback; after asking her teacher, she realized that feedback was always aural, so she set PGA to provide visual alternatives to aural feedback, and that's why now she can see those visual alerts. 

Summary of Emma's needs
- speech to text
- alternative to all audio 
- alternative to aural interactions

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Emma's constellation:

Dan (needs modified interactions)

Background

Dan is 20 years old and studies Law at the University of Virginia. He lives in the campus sharing a room with Peter, another student that has become a friend. Dan just leave the Campus on vacations, to go back to parents' home. 

Dan uses an smartphone and carries a laptop in his wheelchair. At the campus room, he shares a computer with Peter, his roommate.

A typical day

Dan's day starts with "Emerging Markets" class. Most classes in Law Graduate are theoretical and Dan uses his laptop to register the sessions, because he doesn't feel able to take notes at the same pace as the lecturer speaks. Dan has customized permanently his laptop interface with PGA, to make buttons, links and other interactables larger, because their by-default sizes usually require a high level of precission. Dan feels much more confortable with larger clicable areas.

Later at the Campus he will calmly transcript this class and share it with his peers, that also share their notes in a common space. Dan's keyboard uses a smart prediction feature that avoids mistakes and facilitates typing. Prediction has adapted gradually to the words that Dan uses more frequently, so he can write faster as the time goes by.

To work on the transcription, Dan uses the room's computer, which has larger screen and it's much more comfortable than the laptop. Dan enables the same PGA profile as in the laptop, but at the end he switches it off, so Peter can work with computer's default configuration.

At lunch time, Dan takes some time to chat with his family, as usual. He also uses a customized interface in the touchscreen smartphone. It is an adaptation of his computer profile, with larger interactables and smart prediction keyboard and complemented by use of voice recognition. As Dan frequently uses the smartphone while driving his wheelchair, interacting with voice is easier. Anyway, sometimes the ambient noise is loud and he must use the touchscreen: that's why he keeps the big size for interactables.

In the afternoon Dan spends some hours in the library, looking for information about Law and Game Theory, a subject on which he's preparing a project. Besides physical books, he also searches information on library's computers; there he loads his PGA profile version for browsing, with his usual preferences plus simplified layout: when browsing, pages with too items are much more difficult to interact.

Summary of Dan's needs
- simplified layout
- modified pointing device
- larger interactables
- use of voice recognition whereas possible for interaction

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Dan's constellation:

Alain (restricted access to technology)

Background

Alain is a 19 years old student in Cameroon. He's on his first year at the University's Business School. His family home is quite far from the university, so during the week he lives in the Campus and goes back home every weekend and on vacations. In the Business School there are several classrooms with computers, but internet connection quality is not always good. Sometimes he can browse well, some others he's not able to load images, videos or other large files. Alain has two devices that carries with him: a notebook and a simple smartphone. 

A typical day

It's Friday morning, and while having breakfast in his room at the Campus, Alain uses his notebook to give a glance to his email and his favourite newspaper. His notebook screen is small, so he used PGA some months ago to set larger sizes for text and buttons, and that's the configuration that he uses permanently on this device; he saved it as "Notebook display". Connectivity in the Campus is always low, so he's also set his PGA to permanently disable dowloading large media files from his two devices (notebook and smartphone) while in his room, and he just can see text and images. That's his "Slow connection" preset.

At 8:30am he goes to the Business School, and after some classes, he meets two peers to prepare a group activity for Business Analysis course. They go to the computer classroom and start working each one in a computer. Connectivity seems to work fine today. They are in the researching phase, browsing some reference websites to find information. When they find something that can be relevant, they paste it into a shared document. 

After one hour working, connectivity starts to decline, so the three friends decide to disable dowloading large media files in all three computers, using Alain's "Slow connection" preset.

At the end, Alain and his peers discuss how to divide work for this weekend. Alain is unable to connect from his familiar home, so he saves the shared document in his notebook, to continue working on it. 

At night, Alain gets to his parents' home, and after dining he's got some time to work. He switches on his notebook, opens the saved document, and starts working on it. Document's appearance has varied from the one they were working at the university, because as usual, Alain is using "Notebook display". Anyway, he knows that the document will actually keep its original design, so he confidently saves his changes.

On Monday, back to the University, Alain uploads his work from the notebook to the shared document and in the computer classroom verifies that his update is, in fact, consistent with the previous design. 

Summary of Alain's context
- has rare acces to high-speed internet
- has an "antiquated" computer
- has a device with a small display
- has a non-smartphone

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Alain's constellation:

Pat (her needs change temporarily)

Background

Pat is a 42 years old nurse in a London hospital and lives in Colchester. She spends daily about 1 hour to get to work by car, and the same time to go back home in the evening. She works full-time and has 2 kids, so she appreciates every second of her time. Her unfulfilled desire has always been to study History, so when she saw that a brief virtual course about Ancient Greeks was about to start, she decided to enroll it.

Pat uses an smartphone and a tablet. 

A typical day

After leaving her kids at the school, early in the morning, Pat drives to London. When she started the course, she thought that it would be a good idea to invest travel time to study. The first day she took her tablet, entered the course platform and played the video with the lecture. All worked well until video finished after 20 minutes. She was driving, so she couldn't do anything else and Pat felt a bit disappointed.

At lunch time she commented this with her peers, and Rosie, another nurse, told her that her mother was using a tool to customize the computer with her preferences. Pat tried PGA that same night in her tablet, and created a "Car" set with text-to-speech (so she could "read" contents while driving) and voice-activated interactions. This is how Pat can be aware of course contents and manage them while driving. 

In the evening, back at home, she has not available time until kids are sleeping. Then Pat returns to study. Today's homework consists on a short activity that she can prepare in her tablet. Being at home she doesn't need "Car" setting, but at night Pat is always tired and since two years ago she's got eyestrain. She loads another set "Night reading", with larger text size and lower brightness, that doesn't fatigue her vision. 

Summary of Pat's needs
- Doesn't have much time
- Temporarily needs alternatives to visuals and text
- Temporarily needs alternatives to pointers and keyboard

Preference settings that may meet user’s needs:

Pat's constellation:

Kim (changing enviroment, diverse focus of attention)

Kim is an ambitious Process Engineer at a major car parts manufacturer. In addition to his daily responsibilities of fixing and improving the manufacturing lines, he is enrolled in a company sponsored course to learn Six Sigma - a methodology to improve processes.

He enjoys his work very much, but he finds the shift schedule a major drag. Every two weeks he works mornings, then the next two weeks he will work the night shift. Because of this, he finds that his smartphone has become his connection to the outside world. It allows him to keep in touch with his friends through Facebook, keep up to date on news, and play games like “Words with Friends” with his buddies when he has a moment to spare.

His smartphone has also become an indispensable sidekick for work as well - he uses it to remotely monitor machines and will alert him of any potential problems. He also uses it to do his course readings while he’s waiting for trials to run.

Though he has a company laptop - he finds that he is often away from his desk too often to use it except to write reports or long emails. Outside of work, Kim is either sleeping or socializing with friends. As Kim collapses into his bed after a long day of work, he hopes that all this hard work will pay off.

A Typical Day

Kim is on the manufacturing floor testing a new die-cutter on a machine. Although the trial will take 10 minutes to run, Kim can not leave the machine in case someone accidentally turns the machine off, or worse, takes the machine into production. As the machine spins up, Kim puts on his ear plugs and goggles.

While standing there, Kim decides to catch up on his course readings. Using his web browser’s cloud synchronized bookmarks, he resumes his reading of a case study. With his safety equipment on, he is finds the small text hard to read and he won’t be able to hear any audio - so he uses the PGA to enlarge the text and convert any audio to text. The PGA suggests that simplified layout be enabled as well since it has detected that Kim is using a mobile device.

Because Kim has to monitor the machine, he discovers that he keeps re-reading the same sections of text over and over again. Using the PGA, he searches for “distractions” and is presented with a list of suggested settings. Scanning over the available settings, he decides that “Keyword Emphasis and Highlighting” and “Breadcrumbs” was the best. He saves these settings to his phone’s PGA profile.

With the new setting enabled, important words in the article were emphasized and slightly larger. Kim was now able to scan the article quickly without having to read word-for-word. When there was an interesting keyword cluster, he would drop a breadcrumb so that he would remember to return to that spot at a later time.

Suddenly Kim’s phone starts to vibrate and a warning appears on his screen. There is a problem elsewhere in the plant - so Kim quickly stops his test and runs off to investigate.

At home on his laptop, Kim logs into his PGA account - the system defaults to his laptop profile and asks him if he wants to resume where he had left off. Settling into his sofa, Kim decides to save his last known location to another breadcrumb and begins go