SCENARIO-BASED CLAIMS ANALYSIS OF MOOSBURG
SCENARIO 3
John, a VPI freshman, wants to use MOOsburg because some other students are talking about it. He attempts to find the web page www.moosburg.com with his Internet Explorer 4 browser. There are no servers with this address. He then tries www.moosburg.vt.edu with the same problem. He gets connected with Yahoo and search for MOOsburg, only to find two matching sites in Germany. John is determined to use MOOsburg and then calls some of his classmates until he gets the address: http://moosburg.cs.vt.edu. He goes to the login page and logs as an anonymous user (guest). The first problem he encounters is that he cannot read all the text without scrolling. He follows the instructions: "type news to see the news". Then he types "news 2" to see the latest news. A lot of text scrolls down. This is too much so John now decides to look at the web-interface without reading this text. He clicks on the picture and sees a picture of the street in a new window. He finds that great but wonder why a non-active vertical scroll-bar is in the right-side of this window. (to be continued in the next scenario)
CLAIMS ANALYSIS OF SCENARIO 3
- Internet address not easy to find:
... is a real problem for a potential user. There is no real coherence between the name MOOsburg and the address.
... but MOOsburg is still a prototype and does not actively recruit new users now. When it is ready to be open to the public, it will send its URL to all major serch engins and might have its URL changed.
... but MOOsburg may be incorporated with BEV (Blacksburg Electronic Village) and thus be accessed indirectly.
- News problem:
... a virtual newspaper is a good means to provide some help to the users.
... it can help the user to think that he/she is in a community.
... but the actual text-form is not readable without scrolling a lot.
... but with a web-interface, it's really not easy to look at that.
- Vertical Scroll-bar in the picture window:
... can be helpful if the picture is very big.
... but why displaying this scroll-bar when there is no need to use it?
These problems are mainly prototype problems and will certainly be solved.
The newspaper problem has been solved: in the municipal building, the news is in the
web window. But it could become an icon on the toolbar: a virtual paperboy could throw you
the last edition when you log-in and then a newspaper icon could appear on the toolbar.
This would be more natural (direct manipulation) than only typing a command on the
keyboard. By reducing the cognitive distance and increasing the direct
engagement MOOsburg will prove to be easy to learn and use.
The scroll-bar problem is only a prototype problem. If the picture is too big to fit
in the window, some scroll-bar are displayed automatically.
