Welcome back. In this lecture we're going to talk about Use Cases, sometimes also called usage storage. And we're going to go through a couple of examples after we introduce the concepts. Use Cases are specific motivating narratives that are bringing together a user, a need, sometimes a context and a system or design that illustrates how thing should be. They are aspirational. What we mean by that is the use case should motivate us to create this wonderful system that makes people's lives, people's existence, people's work better. When user research is available, these can be linked to personas. Even when user research isn't available yet, sometimes the very first stop for somebody proposing a project, before they collect any data is to say, we've got a vision of why it is that we should start down this path and then go and get user research, you can still be an aspirational vision. Here's an example of one that's an aspirational vision. Sam is overweight but trying to get into better shape through both diet and exercise. His doctor recommended the iEat iStep tracker app for his iPhone. Isn't that a cute name? >> [LAUGH] >> iEat iStep combines a photo based food tracker with a motion in GPS base step and activity tracker. Through each day, Sam takes pictures of the food he eats. Takes a picture before and after to get a good measurement of the quantity consumed. And the app also tracks his activity through the day. At the end of each day, Sam pulls up the app and it asks him a set of questions. For instance, to identify a soft drink from that photo because Coke and Diet Coke look alike but have very different calorie counts and whether his trip from work to the grocery was by bike or motor vehicle because it was moving at a speed where the system couldn't really tell. Sam doesn't actually understand how this thing works. Behind the scene it's a mix of advance AI and crowd source labor. But each day he gets a report on activity in food consumption, and he can see graphs to track his improvement. After 4 weeks of using iEat to iStep, he's lost seven pounds and feels better than ever. What did we get here? This story is aspirational and motivational. Don't you want to be the person who developed this app? Don't you want to help Sam get into shape? It doesn't reflect an analysis of today. It's a vision of what tomorrow could and should be. Now, that doesn't mean it's complete fiction. As we talk about techniques for prototyping and there are people who've come out and created these video prototypes, people who have come out with movies that show what a future would be, but they always argue they should be grounded in what we know will be possible if not today pretty soon. In fact, this iEat iStep all the components of it people either have or are working on. There are folks who are developing tools where you take photos of food and it identifies the food and comes back with nutritional data. There are people already doing trackers where cellphones do an attempt to measure your steps and other things. It's realistic but it doesn't exist. More than anything else, it's a guide to a design and development team. And maybe even the people in marketing and product management who are going to have to make this succeed, that helps answer the question, why are we doing this? >> Right, I think aspirational is a great word, and we can think is this a good thing? Do we think that if we could fulfill this it would be good? Would it be valuable, would it be worthwhile? Would people want to buy it? And then once we think the answer to those questions is yes, then we get to try to make it a reality by building an app that will let Sam actually go through and fulfill this vision. >> Yeah, you could even imagine putting this up on Kickstarter and saying, hey, contribute money if we get half a million dollars we think we can build this. >> Yeah. >> And yeah, I think there's a bunch of Sams out there in the world who would gladly have this app. Some of us would prefer if it were running on Android, but we're not going there. >> [LAUGH] >> What if we do have a persona? We can shorten the use case a bit by linking it to the persona. And we're going to do this for both of the personas we developed in our previous lecture. What about Anna at the Mall? Remember Anna who didn't usually see movies with her children and husband because she has somewhat corky tastes, well Anna had a few hours to kill at the mall and was hoping to find that movie worth seeing. She's no film expert just an artist with somewhat corky tastes so she appreciates tools that understand those tastes and know about movies. Anna pulled up the MovieLens Mobile App on her cell phone. MovieLens already knows a great deal about her tastes from the movie ratings she has entered previously. The app used her location to identify the theater, and displayed a list of upcoming showings with star value suggesting which ones Anna would like. Anna saw Sam the Dragon Trainer was playing in 20 minutes, and then MovieLens thought she'd give it 4.5 stars out of 5. She bought a ticket, Saw the movie, loved it and actually rated it 5 stars. What do we get from this example? We're linking it to Anna. This is consistent with the story of the persona. But we've shifted into something that's again aspirational. It's aspirational in part because there is no MovieLens Mobile App. >> Right. >> We're trying to convince somebody to design and build one. MovieLens has no location data. MovieLens has no theater showing data. And what this is doing is saying, wouldn't it be cool if we had all of that? Would it be? That's why we're writing this particular use case. We can circulate it around. See do people rally and say, I would use that. Do people say, I would never do something like that. I'd never go to the mall without knowing what I was going to see, just go randomly see a movie. >> The use case combines what we know about Anna. It combines this aspirational story that includes her goals, what she's trying to accomplish, and a vision for how a technology could work to support those goals. >> And that's the example of why we want a use case. Let's do one more. Let's take Victor. Remember Victor, the film buff and long time MovieLens user. Well, he's invited to join a panel of experts presenting their all time top 100 movie lists. We wanted to localize this, we could put this at the Y in some cities, this might happen at a community college and other places, different places might have different venues that would be appropriate. Well, a few films come quickly to Victor. The Godfather, Part two. Citizen Kane. But putting down 100 of them and specifically just 100 seems like a challenge. Victor decides to use MovieLens to help. He asked the site to show him all the movies he's already seen sorted by his rating and finds nearly 100 that he's rated five stars. Just to double check he also looks at top unseen movies, and top movies by overall popularity, and given these movies, he's quickly able to make his personal list. We could provide more detail here if we wanted to. We really don't need to. We've gotten the essence of what this use case is. As we reflect on these examples, they're evocative, they're concrete. They involve the system and in some case specific interface details. And most of all, they show how the system solves a problem or meets a need or in some way make somebody's life better. They're different from tasks which we'll be coming back to in our next lecture, because they do involve specific interface details. They span all of the parts. They can involve how, they can involve what, they can do all of those different things while just telling a good story. And that's just the essence of this is that it's going to focus on telling a good story. That's our Use Case Introduction. And an example of one purely aspirational and two persona linked Use Cases. >> See you next time.
