Scenarios
& Claims Analysis

Interviews

E-mails

Surveys

Qualitative Analysis

Suggestions

Conclusion

Visit Nostalgia

The Blacksburg Nostalgia Web site was designed to develop a library of historical events of the town using the seniors' memorybase.

Motivation for the development of the Nostalgia project came from the fact that the seniors exchanged their experiences and memories of the past on the seniors' listserv. Allowing this kind of interaction on the Internet to create a priceless resource of stories of the history of Blacksburg was easily conceivable. Two similar projects, Storybase and Historybase, though created for different purposes and user classes, had similar functions and created the foundation for the Nostalgia project.

Functional overview of the Blacksburg Nostalgia Web site

The Nostalgia site is headed with a picture of downtown which immediately spurs memories of the past. It is followed by an introduction to the site and instructions about composing a story or memories from the past. The compose link leads to a form for the story and other related information. This form is headed by another postcard picture and more information about the site and instructions. There are several links to this compose form throughout the site.

Any comments or suggestions can be sent to Dr. Rosson through e-mail which again has several links throughout the site. The front page is then followed by a list of headings of submitted stories which lead to the stories and annotations associated with them, keywords indicating the content of the story, author and e-mail, date the story was submitted, and the number and date of the last annotaion. The e-mail address is linked to a mail feature which enables you to send e-mail to the author.

The Story page itself has the story and annotations headed by the name and e-mail address of the contributer. There is link to add an annotation which has a form to add the annotation headed by the story and other annotations for reference.

Objectives of the Case Study

In this project we attempt to do a design case analysis of the Nostalgia Web site. We specifically seek answers to:

• Motivation for the development of the Nostalgia Project.
• User (Blacksburg seniors) need analysis.
• Analysis of the design process: Interaction between the designers and the users, design related problems.
• Qualitative Analysis of the use of the site.
• Suggestions for improvement and redesign of the site.

Approach

• Interviews with the designers -- Dr. Rosson, John Kelso, and Dr. Carroll. The designers were interviewed to analyze their perception of the users' needs, design strategy, potential problems faced during design, trade-offs and limitations, and solutions.
• One of the users, actively involved in the design process, Dr. Keith Furr was also interviewed to obtain his opinion about the same issues but from the users' perspective.
• Surveys: The seniors who had contributed stories and annotations to the site were asked to fill surveys to obtain their views about the use of the site and analyze the way the site is actually used.
• Exhaustive Scenarios and Claims Analysis. This was divided into two phases, preliminary claims analysis was done before the interviews and the surveys. These were mainly grounded in the usability issues of the WWW and laid the foundation for issues to be addressed in the interviews and surveys.
• Revised Scenarios and Claims Analysis was done after the interviews and surveys, which were based on the analyses of the user needs and design issues. These scenarios were grounded in traditional theories of GOMS, TAG, Interface Metaphors, and Direct Manipulation keeping in mind the user class (seniors).
• Qualitative Analysis of the use of the site by studying and analyzing the stories and annotations, the subjects that invoked annotations, etc., to better structure the site.

Rationale behind the approach

• To do the design case study the history of the development of the project was required. Interviews was found to be an effective way to gather the design related issues.
• Needs Analysis was done to gather user requirements and analyze the possible gap between the requirements and design.
• Preliminary claims analysis helped in laying the foundation for the interviews and surveys.
• Revised claims analysis was helpful in the extensive analysis of the design keeping in mind the user requirements and design issues. It laid the foundation for suggestions about redesign.
• Qualitative Analysis by studying the stories and analyzing the use of the site was done to validate the claims analysis and redesign issues.