Activity 6.1: User Requirements for Covey Town

For this activity, you will perform requirements elicitation and user-centered design of the new room capabilities that Avery’s company has been adding to Covey Town.

The Story So far

If you have run the covey.town application, you may have noticed that everyone is placed in the same place (“room” in Covey Town jargon). Avery’s next task is to implement a way for users to select a “room” to enter, and to be able to create new rooms to meet their friends, and these room can be public or not.

Each “room” is described in a format (explained elsewhere), and so when a user creates a room, they will also provide the room format in the form of a URL to en existing resource. Avery was told that others in the team have provided a way to check the room format URL and that if the format is not acceptable, an end-user understandable message is provided.

As part of the introduction to all parts of the company, Avery will accompany the lead UX designer (Calin) in a meeting with some prospective users to elicit requirements and design ideas. One of their first tasks is to come up with a better term than “room” to use in user-facing materials.

Activity

In this activity, each breakout group will role-play the people in this meeting. The roles should be assigned: two people playing Avery and Calin, and the others playing the part of users. The first step is for all members of the group to use the existing Covey Town application to ensure that everyone is familiar the current system.

Next Avery and Calin should introduce the users to the idea of multiple rooms. They should not use the term “room” but instead should leave the naming to the users. This might take some planning. They should introduce the idea that people may want a choice or to be able to make their own. They should inquire of the users how they would expect and want the user interface to work.

When the users give some idea, Avery should try drawing ideas in free-hand drawing on a “whiteboard” or in shared drawing application or even a shared text editor. Calin will ask the users to comment and suggest corrections and additions. Calin should be taking notes. The two should elicit from the users how the product would best work for the purpose of creating and joining rooms. Avery should make sure to save any provisionally accepted drawings.

The duo should ensure that the meeting addresses the following topics:

• What term should replace “room”
• What page the updated application will first present to a user arriving at the site.
• How a user selects whether to create a new room, or join an existing room.
• How a user creates a new room, including
  • the idea of a “friendly name”,
  • whether the room will be “public”,
  • which room format will be used and whether there are defaults,
  • how the CoveyRoomID is communicated.
• How a user joins a room, including
  • how to select an existing public room,
  • how to select an existing (or newly created!) private room.

The result should be a provisional design with the various rough visuals created by Avery, and the scenarios (including at least one room creation, and at least one public room being joined and one private room being joined) sketched out by Calin.

After this segment is completed, all the members of the breakout room should take on the role of UX designers in the company and evaluate the provisional design using the ten Nielsen heuristics. It might be more efficient to divide up the heuristics so that two people work on each heuristic. Not all of the heuristics will be relevant. The group should generate a document with a sentence or two for each heuristic explaining the evaluation.

Writing up the provisional design and evaluation is likely to uncover omissions and vagueness that should be addressed in the next meeting with the users. It may also suggest ways in which the UI should be fleshed out further. The last deliverable of the team should be a short list of points to bring up with the user in the next meeting.

Deliverables

In summary, the deliverables for this activity are

1. Rough sketches of the UI;
2. At least three scenarios (narratives), each a single paragraph explaining a user interaction;
3. Evaluation against the ten Nielsen heuristics;
4. Brief list of topics for next meeting.

The group should create a single zip file with all elements and drop in the slack associated with their lecture.