Key findings

  • Important to encourage good fit between the events and those attending events
  • There are many methods for sharing information that attracts different audience groups
  • Activities with a variety of participation options are more attractive
  • Time and availability are constraints; it’s hard to fit things into a schedule if they are not planned in advance
  • Not knowing about events is a significant constraint
  • Transportation is a constraint
  • There are plenty of opportunities available on/off campus
  • Personal connections, personalization, and convenience help people overcome constraints
  • Participation can be encouraged with external perks
  • Technology proves a significant barrier for many Williamstown/local residents

These problems, themes, and practices suggest that three main pain points felt by those looking to engage in community life (both on and off campus) are related to 1.) convenience, 2.) accessibility of information, and 3.) personalization. These three points are very closely related, as convenience largely includes the ease with which information can be attained and the degree to which the things you learn about are tailored to your interest. However, convenience is a broader category than either of these latter two, and both information accessibility and personalization (information overload) constraints have relevance beyond convenience. We identified these themes through creating an affinity diagram. We wrote down as many points from our interviews and CIs as we could think of, putting each idea on a separate stick note. Then we laid the sticky notes out on a table (unorganized) and together grouped them by related themes. After we had loose groupings we reviewed each of them to see if any ideas fit better elsewhere. When we were happy with the groupings we created a ‘header’ for each, which reflected what we thought the most important ideas were. These became our themes.

Updated project

After seeing these main themes, we felt that revising our initial project focus would allow for us to better meet these needs. Rather than focusing explicitly on bringing people together, we think it makes the most sense to focus on mitigating these constraints, thus enabling our users to become more engaged in events that interest them. Hopefully, a side effect of this will be to bring people with similar interests together; this is potentially an even more likely outcome than if we tried to design for connection specifically, as it will allow relationships to develop organically in the context of shared interest. As such, our revised project idea is as follows: we will create an app that provides the user with customizable, personalized information about events near them. The main purpose will be to increase the ease with which they can access information, and to limit the information they are exposed to to that which they have marked as being as interest. At its most fundamental level, this could be understood as an augmented, more easily accessible and personalizable version of the Williams event calendar. However, it will go beyond the function of the event calendar by including events listed by student groups and clubs, organized off-campus events, and events listed by individual (verified) users. Such events can also be tagged to a physical location. This will be particularly helpful for seeing on a map where events take place, or for users becoming aware of something they may not have known about otherwise. For example, if a drawing group tags a location they are working at and a user sees they are nearby, they could learn more about the group on the spot by reading about them on the app, and then would feel more comfortable asking to join or learn more. Users will be able to select categories or topics they would like to stay informed of, and the events they see on their personal event calendar will be limited to this. If they tag interest in an event, they will receive a notification 15 minutes (as a default) prior to the scheduled start time. This will mitigate the likelihood that someone misses something of interest because they weren’t sure they’d be free, and thus didn’t take the extra time to add every possible activity to their own schedule. If someone elects to share their personal calendar with the app, recommendations can be made specifically for times that the user is not otherwise engaged. Finally, the user will have a chance to rate their experience. These ratings will not be public (as the point is to cater to interest), but will inform the recommendation system that suggests events to the user.

Research participants

On Sunday, September 29th, we interviewed NW in upstairs Paresky where they usually do their homework. NW is a sophomore Williams student involved with CLiA. They did an internship with CLiA over this past summer, which was their introduction to the group. During the internship, NW met with community and nonprofit leaders from around Berkshire county and did an independent project revamping the website for the Louison House. NW now serves as the head of communications for CLiA. On Wednesday, October 2nd, we interviewed PC in their office at CLiA’s headquarters. PC is a staff member of Williams college and head of CLiA. PC is in charge of connecting community members interested in working with students, to students looking to engage with the off-campus community. PC also connects professors with off-campus opportunities to allow them to offer fieldwork as part of their course and promotes the events of other clubs that participate in volunteer work or off campus activities. On Wednesday, October 2nd, we also interviewed JM in their office. JM works in the music department, and is mainly involved with organizing music events throughout the school year. JM is in charge of contacting people from outside to come to campus and perform (both for academic purposes and for entertainment). They are also in charge of PR, displaying these events to the general public, both in and out of campus.

Process

Before every interview, we outlined some basic questions and topics that we wanted to hit during the interview. They varied slightly, depending on the interviewee’s background, but mostly revolved around what their job was, their role in connecting the on-campus and off-campus community, and how they fulfilled that role. The interviews were mainly informal interviews with a contextual inquiry component. To conduct the contextual inquiry, we asked the interviewees to walk us through how they would perform their role, or a main aspect of their role. We asked NW to walk us through the steps they usually took to broadcast an opportunity to engage with the wider Berkshire community to the campus community and also what steps they, as a student, take to find out about the opportunities available. We asked PC to talk us through the steps they would take after being approached by someone with an off-campus opportunity for students. We asked JM to walk us through the different ways he would go about publicizing music events, and to explain the timeline of the publicity as he did so. PC was very excited about our project and while explaining the work they did and how they did it, they pointed out parts of the process that they thought would make a good app or would make their lives easier if it was made into an app. For example, there is a form that people must fill out if they want to invite students to an off-campus opportunity; PC thought that it would be much easier and more efficient to get people to fill out the form if it was an app, instead of having people call or email CLiA in lieu of filing out the form and require several conversations about the nature of the project in order for CLiA to gather enough information to create an event. Since PC has dealt a lot with being the matchmaker for off-campus activities and students, they know from experience where the weak points or inefficiencies of the process are. A lot of people who want to get students involved with their off-campus project are unaware of the college timeline (when school starts, when semesters end, when midterms are, when classes end, etc) and don’t realize the impact it has on student availability. PC usually has to take a lot of time to work out a schedule that works for both the project manager and the typical Williams student. JM had a distinct perspective as their job is largely focused on publicizing on-campus events, and as such they spend a large majority of their time focusing on making these events known. The methods and mediums they use to spread word of events are already very well thought out and comprehensive, targeting both students (primarily), faculty, other local residents, and even tourists and alumni. When we asked JM to walk us through the way he would share these messages, he was able to tell us all about the different demographics that responded to each medium. This provided us with helpful insight, because he told us that the demographic that responded to digital mediums, particularly those more “technological” than simply the main Williams event calendar, were almost all students, and that many middle aged and older residents relied on physical mailers, email mailing lists, and even audio recordings via phone call in order to get information. He hypothesized that email struck a nice balance between convenience and approachability that appealed to most demographics, while other, more involved methods of getting information (including even searching and sorting for events on the Williams event calendar) did not offer. This leads to questions about what demographic would even want to interact with an app primarily focused around creating more niche connections; if the app was a more convenient and customizable form of the event calendar, it might attract locals by being an improvement over organization-specific email lists or a somewhat unwieldy web calendar that can not unilaterally provide the user with information. However, at least along these dimensions, we may need to reconsider whether the audience this medium would attract is what we would need in order to make the app effective.

Task analysis

Users

The app is designed for people who are looking for suitable events to attend. We try to cater to a large range of users, from college students to neighborhood members. Every college, neighborhood has some form of calendar events, and we want to broadcast events that cater to the interests of each individual.

Present

When people are looking for community events, people turn to established sources of scheduled event listings. Posters, email lists, and FaceBook pages are typical sources of finding event information. Students have check Daily Messages as well. If they are interested in an event, they will have to save the information somewhere and put it in their schedule. To announce an event, people need to post their event promotions to one or more of the venues listed above.

Desires

Our users are looking for a more convenient, accessible and personalized way at looking for events.

Learned

There are various forms of reaching out to community, from posters, fliers, event pages, to personal newsletter and Facebook event pages. As mentioned by our interviewee JM, some people even preferred face-to-face event introduction (advertisement). There is no universal standard. The app will need to cater to these varying demands.

Location

These tasks should be able to be performed anywhere, at anytime. Users can check for events happening at a time and place of their choosing wherever they may be at the current moment. People updating live events will be at the location of said event to drop their geotag.

Relationship

The relationship between the person and the data should be informative and consistent. The goal is for a user to know what is happening, that is of interest to them, whenever things are happening. The relationship should reflect that of a community member and a community, as the user will have a wide variety of information about events to look at and take from, provided by the members in the community. On the flip side of the relationship, a user can reach out to their community by dropping their tagged event into the app to notify others about the opportunity to attend..

Options

The users’ other forms of learning about events include social media platforms, posters, handbooks, information sessions, or from person to person.

Communication

The user will learn about community’s events through event posts or geo tag, through which they can learn more about the organizers and get in contact directly if desired.

Frequency

Event posts should be updated every week to keep up with the newest posts and event tags. As a result, users can easily follow the event tags they prefer.

Time Limits

As long as the event posts are updated on time, the rest of the functions, including getting information, should be spontaneous, with no delays.

Errors

When things go wrong, users can still fall back on the normal event calendar. There can be an implemented Help session that helps users who detect issues report them back to the system.