(PGA) Use Cases (January 2013)

Owned by Tona Monjo
Last updated: Feb 11, 2013Version comment
7 min read

Use case 1: Alain

Alain is a 17 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. Some times he can browse with no problems, some others he's not able to load images, videos or other large files. Alain's got two devices that carries with him: a notebook and a simple smartphone. 

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. Notebook's 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. 

Use case 2: Rosie

Rosie is a 45 years old nurse, living in London. She works full-time and has 3 kids, so she appreciates every second of her free 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.

That's why for 4 weeks, Rosie will be devoting all her free time to the course. She thinks that she will be able to do it with the help of her smartphone and her tablet. 

On Wednesday morning, Rosie wakes up and rushes to get her kids ready for the school. After leaving them, she takes the bus to the Hospital (her workplace) and spends the 40 minutes trip checking today's course scheduling and reading some materials. Virtual campus and materials are not adapted to the small smartphone screen, so the first day she prepared a PGA setting with larger text and buttons, white background and higher contrast, and saved it as "Mobile-studying". These settings are automatically enabled when she enters the campus and disabled when she quits, because she only needs them there. 

At the Hospital, she spends lunchtime studying on her tablet. Materials and campus items are readable on the tablet, so she doesn't need to enable the same PGA as in the smartphone. However, the dinning room is noisy, very bright and has a slow connection. When she discovered this, she prepared a "Tablet-Hospital" preset to mute the tablet, increase screen brightness and contrast, enable captions for audio and disable videos or large files. 

Back at home, she has not free time until kids are sleeping. Today she must prepare a short activity, so she switches on the computer. Although she usually has good vision, at night she's got eyestrain, so she enables her PGA preset "So tired!", with larger displaying and low brigthness.

After ending the activity, she turns off the computer and takes the tablet to continue reading in the bed. Rosie loads "So tired!" too, because it also works for her in the tablet. Just five minutes more and she will be sleeping...

Use case 3: Mark

Mark is a 31 years old teacher of Science, at a secondary school in Toronto. He loves preparing materials and activities for his students. 

Tuesday night, Mark is at home working on a new activity for Wednesday's class. He's preparing an interactive activity in which students will perform several actions on their class computers, to learn about Scientific Measurements. Students will drag objects, answer to questions, link items... this will be fun! 

When he's got the activity ready, he wants to check if it is really usable for all the students. Mike is a student that needs larger text and interactables and higher screen contrast, and Pat broke her right arm fifteen days ago. Both shared their PGA presets with him, so each time he prepares an activity, he can check how will their interface actually be. 

First, Mark loads Mike's profile. He checks one-by-one each activity, and realizes that the contrast of one graphic is extremely low, even under Mike's settings (that have increased contrast). Mark modifies this graphic, reloads it and notes that now looks much better in Mike's profile. That's right!

Then Mark loads Pat's settings. Pat can not be very accurate with her left hand, so she has set larger interactables. Mark realizes that hot spots for dragging interactions will still be too small for Pat, but he's not sure to modify Pat's profile, because he doesn't like changing other's settings. Finally Mark decides to duplicate Pat's preset, increase hot spots size, and save the new settings as "Pat-measurements". Then Mark shares this preset with Pat with a message: "Pat, for Scientific Measurements' activity, you will need to be very accurate when dragging elements. I've prepared this preset, which I think can work better for this specific exercise". 

On Wednesday morning, Science class starts. Mark explain some concepts and then tells students to do the interactive activity. When Pat enters her computer, a PGA notification appears wih Mark's message. She realizes that "Pat-measurements" can be helpful, so she loads this preset and starts to perform today's activity. That's fun!

Use case 4: Hanna

Hanna is teacher of Art History in a virtual course. She uses an authoring tool to prepare class contents, that usually contain a lot of images and videos on art. 

Today she is preparing a lecture about Contemporary Art that includes text, videos and images. The lecture ends with a quizz so the students can check their learning process. Hanna is aware of the diversity of her students, so she usually adds transcripts to each video and image.  

When Hanna ends authoring, she prepares the lecture to be published. The authoring tool informs her about how will the document be described, and other metadata like language, formats, etc. She edits the description to make it more clear, and while reviewing metadata, Hanna notes that there's an alert about one video that doesn't contain transcription, and that she hasn't included captions. Hanna must leave soon, so she has not time to edit captions but adds the missing transcription. 

Hanna publishes the lecture and reserves some time tomorrow to work on captions.

Use case 5: Alex

Alex is 20 years old that works as a waiter in a London restaurant and lives in Milton Keynes. He spends daily more than an hour to get to work by train, and the same time to get back home. Alex didn't finish secondary studies, so when he discovered that he could continue studies in a virtual school, he enrolled it. 

Today he must study Art History and Maths. Before leaving to work, he takes some time to study in his home computer. He starts reading today's lecture about Contemporary Art. 

When he leaves to the train, Alex takes with him his tablet, as usual. Reading at the train is not very comfortable, so he set his tablet to automatically enable text-to-speech while reading course materials in the train.

After 30 minutes, he decides to change of subject, and starts Math lecture. Text-to-speech works well until it encounters a formula that is not able to transcript. Seems that the author has forgotten this issue! Alex sends a request for text-to-speech transcription for mathematical formulas in the document. 

One day later, he receives a notification that the lecture has been updated with formulas' transcription. 

Use case 6: Chau

(warning) Work in progress. - JH

  • Visiting Vancouver on a student visa from Hong Kong
  • Studying computer science at UBC
  • learning English as a second language
  • technically savvy
  • owns a Windows 8 touch screen laptop which he uses for school
  • has a new iPhone 5 (never had an iPhone - used Nokia previously)
  • has good access to Internet at the University where he tries to do majority of his work.
  • uses tethering over LTE when off campus - tries to conserve due to limited data plan

Chau is a foreign student from China and is studying Computer Science at UBC. He is very focused on his studies and finds little time or money to do much else. Despite this, Chau enjoys his time at the university and whenever possible, takes advantage of the plethora of services available to students.

It's crunch time and Chau has a number of major assignments and exams due soon. Using the university’s computer lab, he logs onto his course’s website and gets started on his Algorithms assignment. He quickly finds that the numbers and formulas in the questions lack meaning because the wording of the questions are confusing.

Using the PGA, he chooses “Simplified English” to give a less-complicated interpretation of the text (he could have chosen to translate the text to Chinese, but Chau is trying to learn as much English as possible). Immediately the default English is substituted for a simpler version.

Before he gets much further, Chau graciously gives up his workstation to a classmate who doesn’t have a laptop. Chau finds a