Week 6 commentary

Anthony Wei

A06065141

Tuesday 5/8

Interviewed a roommate 2nd year, male ERC student who has no experience living on-campus. It was a mid-level interview that lasted roughly 10 minutes. I asked him to find 3 buildings (WLH 2204, UC 611, and the nanatorium) using the maps.ucsd.edu site. Upon finding each building using the site, i asked him the range in difficulty (scale from 1-5) on how comfortable he would be in walking to the location, driving there, and finding parking there. He commented that for WLH and the nanatorium, he could easily walk there because he had already visited those locations, but that if he were a visitor, the satellite image that the maps site gave would not have helped very much. Even as a 2nd year, he did not know where UC 611 was and was uncomfortable with his ability to find the location given the data from the map.

Wednesday 5/9

Group meeting with Nick and Ken. We talked about the interviews we had done and started discussing reoccuring themes briefly. Nick and Ken had already conducted contextual interviews so we spent most of the time discussing those.

Friday 5/11

Conducted a contextual interview with a 4th year, male Warren transfer student with zero experience living on campus. I asked him to find the administration buildings and study lounges for each of the six colleges, and studied the ways in which he went about doing so. One thing i noticed was that he entered in "admin buildings" into the ucsd maps site and an overwhelming amount of search results appeared, and he looked frustrated as he had to scroll through a laundry list of buildings to find the six that he wanted. He said that he felt comfortable finding the six administration buildings. Upon viewing the map, one thing i noticed was that he would zoom in a few times and look around for landmarks and reference points. At one point he said out loud "oh that looks like muir parking lot". I asked him about it and he explained that if he was a first time visitor it would have been difficult to find the locations of the building, and suggested that if there were directions with the map things would be easier. Furthermore, he claimed that things would be easier if the names of the buildings were there instead of the satellite image. One interesting thing is that he did not notice the three options for different maps (visitor, parking, simple). I pointed this out to him and he commented that he didn't realize those were there. Upon looking for the study halls, he entered in "study hall" into the search box and many search results appeared. Some were even irrelevant, such as "Marshall College". He seemed frustrated as he pressed the back button and entered in "study hall college" into the search box. Again, there were many irrelevant search results. By this time about 20 minutes had passed and he didn’t seem like he wanted to continue looking. He said with a sigh, “Ah forget it, I give up”. He complained about the searching mechanism and how the search returns were too broad.

Sunday 5/13

Met up with Nick, Ken, and Chrissy and talked about our interviews again. Ken mentioned that I should have forced the person I interviewed to find those study halls, as the data from that would have been valuable, but I think that the fact that a 4^th year student (although this is only his 2^nd year here) giving up on finding a location is valuable data in and of itself regarding the effectiveness of the site. Talked about goals for next week and split up responsibilities.

Goals for Next Week:

Conduct another contextual interview with a friend of mine (visitor) who is coming down for SunGod. Get a few surveys filled out. Fulfill my responsibility of finding out information about the resident houses in John Muir College. (tioga, tenaya, the apartments). Meet up with the group more often.