For next week, design a system that will help you manage your personal information.

Background

While many personal productivity tools exist, few cover the specific issues of a full or part time student. Few provide any guidance on workflow. Most of us face issues of integration with other systems: maybe we want to integrate with canvas, messaging apps, todo lists, and calendars. Rarely do we give ourselves time to figure out how to manage our lives in a better way.

In this assignment, you are your own client. You will design a system that will address your own life. The idea is to design something that you can build and use.

Process

Here is a recommended suggestion on how to proceed.

First, consider real events that have happened over the last several weeks in which whatever systems, apps or processes you have in place might not have worked very well. For example, you might have missed an appointment, or gotten trapped in overlapping commitments, or been overly rushed in some of your activities, or done an unimportant task at the expense of not completing an important task. Or you found out too late about an event you would have liked to go to. There are many examples; they dont have to involve huge difficulties, but they should be incidents you genuinely thought were problems at that time, incidents you would not like to live over again.

Find a few of these past events, and pick one that is either most important to you or most representative of a larger issue.

Then write a scenario that represents that event as a specific narrative. We will call this the problem scenario. For example:

I was asked by Nicole as part of an email to set of people if it would be OK to meet on Thursday afternoon two weeks from the time of the email. I replied yes, but didnt mark it down, because I wasnt sure if everyone else was going to say yes. A week later, I got a request from John to shift an event the following week from Tuesday to Thursday afternoon. I said yes. Then yesterday I got an email from Nicole with an agenda for a meeting to take place today. I was surprised; I went back through the email trail, and found that I had missed an email confirming the first meeting move, perhaps because it was sent not by Nicole but by someone I didnt know, Cynthia.

Notice the scenario is very specific, involving names of people and exact times. It is not a general specification like: From now on all meetings should not overlap. Such specifications are usually not helpful because they dont provide a specific problem to fix, and fixing the general problem is often impossible: overlaps can happen for any number of reasons.

Once you have created the problem scenario, diagram it with a sequence diagram. This will involve first of all abstracting out the actors in the system and figuring out how information flowed as messages between the different actors.

Now consider how you would judge a solution to the problem. What criteria are important for you? Identify at least two such criteria. For example, perhaps one wants to minimize the amount of time in managing appointments. And one wants to minimize the amount of time in building a system that will fix the problem.

Having done that, your job is to come up with three alternative future scenarios. These scenarios are what you would have liked to have happened. For example, here are two alternative future scenarios:

I was asked by Nicole as part of an email to set of people if it would be OK to meet on Thursday afternoon two weeks from the time of the email. I replied yes, and marked it down as a possible but not certain appointment, because I wasnt sure if everyone else was going to say yes. A week later, I got a request from John to shift an event the following week from Tuesday to Thursday afternoon. I said I needed a few hours to check and see if the meeting had a conflict; I checked with Nicole, found out the meeting had moved, and told John I couldnt meet on Thursday. Nicole also told me I had missed an email confirming: I went back and found indeed that was the case.

That scenario involves the step of recording possible as well as certain meetings. It still assumes I missed the second confirming email. In this alternative, I do more high tech stuff.

I was asked by Nicole as part of an email to set of people if it would be OK to meet on Thursday afternoon two weeks from the time of the email. I replied yes. My natural language processing system parsed my email and automatically put it on my calendar as possible. Later when Cynthia sent a confirming email, my natural language processing system updated the meeting from possible to confirmed. When John called asking if I was available Thursday I said no.

The above solution scenario assumes I have built a very complex AI system that parses my mail and controls my calendar.

Once you have generated three solution scenarios, do an evaluation of them. Specifically, create a graph with your criteria as axes, and plot your solution on that graph.

For example, the first solution scenario involves, say, a medium amount of effort to record appointments, and a minimum effort to build the systems. Essentially, it can be done with a process change without building any software. The second solution scenario involves no effort to update a calendar, but involves high effort in building a system.

Once you have created this graph, decide which solution you would like to build.

Draw the sequence diagram for this favored solution.

Then figure out how you will implement the system you want to build. You will want to create a prototype. In the case of scenario 2, you might build a simple proof of concept that shows that you can take a simple message with data, time, and meeting and update Google Calendar. In the case of scenario 1, you would think through what you would need that is systematic. For example, you may need a process for periodically scanning for possible appointments and reaching out to find out if those appointments have in fact been confirmed. This might involve setting alarms related to upcoming events, or just setting up a day and time every week to scan future calendar dates.

Deliverables

Week 1:

• One problem scenario and three solution scenarios
• A list of evaluation criteria (have at least 2)
• A plot of the solution scenarios against the criteria. That is, each solution should be a dot on a graph or radar chart. You will have three dots, each labeled with a word naming the solution.
• Pick one solution scenario to develop further.
• Create a sequence diagram for it.
• Create a structure diagram (a deployment diagram) showing the different components and where you expect them to run.
• Upload all the above to Canvas a pdf.
• A rough prototype, or something to say about the prototype you want to build next week
• Condense your ideas into one or two slides that you can present in 3 minutes maximum. Upload the slide(s) into Canvas also as a powerpoint or pdf. We will work off my computer to avoid computer switching time.

Week 2:

• A final design, including the information above. Upload as PDF.
• A prototype. Upload as screenshots.