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Initial Customer Meeting
Results
More details from jkdot and jsegars
Details of meeting on 01/29
from jkdot and jsegars
Notes from 2/5/03 meeting with Dr. Nguyen
Notes from meeting with DXN 2/19/2003
- Simulate a shopping mall -- Dr. Nguyen is a mall developer
- Simulate how a store will do in a certain situation.
- Customers "appear out of nowhere".
- Has demographic information -- ethnicity, finances
- Application is distributed.
- Client creates his/her "store".
- Customers go from store to store.
- Graphical interface can see whole mall and customers moving around.
- Stores have items that the customer can buy -- e.g. menu items,
etc. List is changeble.
- Layout of store for later.
- Location of store in mall is selectable given available slots -- for
later.
- Customers interact with each other -- later. E.g.
shoplifters, muggers, families.
- Customers entering in "real time" -- i.e. who and how many enter
depends on time.
- Everything is changeable.
- Does want resulting statistical data too.
- Customers could have different store-to-store movement
behavior.
- Could be extended for other processing applications.
- Dr. Nguyen wants a single point of contact with the
programming team.
Basically, Jeff and I (Kijana) talked with Dr. Nguyen earlier
this week about what he envisioned seeing when he used the
application. We tried to be as specific as possible so we could
better understand his concept of the project. Below is a summary of
everything we talked about:
- The project is distributed to maximize computing power and be
accessible from remote locations.
- The target audience would be made up of intermediate to expert level
PC users. When we asked him what distinction he wanted to see
between the "administrator" behaviour and the "client" (shop owner)
behaviour, he really didn't say much besides he, the administrator,
wanted "more functionality". This is pretty vague right now...
- The customer didn't desire robust graphics at all. In fact, he
specifically said, "No 3D stuff." He wants a floor plan (bird's
eye view) of the mall with squares/rectangles representing
storefronts. The people, on the map, can be represented by
dots. He also said that the ability to zoom out of a store to
surrounding areas or the whole map (I'm thinking sort of like how you
can zoom in and out of a map on MapQuest, in varying degrees) would be a
good idea.
- The customer (DXN) will enter the demographic information.
- The data required to build a store is the type of merchandise sold
and the prices. Prices (or merchandise) can be changed by store
owners based on what they see as far as competition from other
stores.
- The users of the application should be able to see the simulation
running in the GUI, movement of "people", and competition (price
wars?).
- Shop owners, though focusing on their individual stores, will be
able to know (and/or see) about other stores.
- As far as platforms are concerned, this should run in Windows.
He said extending it to Pocket PC would also be nice since that would
promote the "game-like" quality of this application. (He sees this
likened to a game or something users can "play" with).
- The administrator can also change environmental, geographic, and
demographic information.
Like I said, I'm putting this up here so that you'll at least know
about it and keep his vision in mind. After Jeff and I prototype the
interface and present Dr. Nguyen with scenarios, perhaps his wants/needs
will change. We'll keep you posted.
Questions?
Thanks,
Kijana
- Even though you don't really need to know individual
stats on the people in the mall (you would prefer to only know
this on the store level), our other "customers", the
developers, may want to know this.
- Users (running the store owner simulations) will have
the ability to "open" and "close" a store. This is a safe
way to stop and resume action. Nothing will happen to the store
when it is properly closed. However, we have to figure
out an elegant way to handle the event when the network
or system crashes and the stores are abandoned.
- Broadcasting things like sales is a good thing, as
other stores and the shoppers will need to know this.
We've got to come up with a way to "inform" shoppers of the
sales (intrinsic knowledge? signs? announcements?)
- Other shopper behavior to model may be compulsive
buying. Reasonably model the shopper actions.
- I sketched out the two main interfaces (mall
owner/shop owner) on the whiteboard. [Jeff, our basic
idea seems to work. We'll talk about this later]. I also
added the point that a chat window may be a good thing to have
if we're providing a game atmosphere. This also seemed to be a
good asset.
One thing that I forgot to mention was the notion of
expanding the mall (the mall is doing well, and you want to make
room for more stores). Jeff and I thought that it would
also be a good feature. We also want to know what you may like to
see in the way of "mini-milestones" or intermediate
progress. If there are any questions, please let me
know. Thanks, Kijana
Notes from 2/5/03 meeting with Dr. Nguyen
Prototype 1 Demo
Interface issues (from usage):
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Customer wanted to click directly on map to zoom. I
think we had designed it so that the user would click the magnifying
glass and then zoom. We should probably allow a variety of
actions for zooming.
-
With the chat functionality, he seemed a little unsure of who
he was chatting with. Need to make this clear in the
interface.
-
He also asked how he would start the simulation (automatic
on open/creation or is there a Start button?)
-
Overall, he was able to get around in the interface fairly
easily. He likes it (it's clean, simple, and intuitive).
-
I sketched the proposed "watch list" feature on the
whiteboard and he seemed to understand it. (still thinks it would be
a good feature)
Other questions/comments:
-
The customer wanted to know if he, as the manager could
start/stop the simulation of a particular store (dynamically).
-
Everything is running in real time in the main simulation
window.
-
He mentioned wanting the ability to change/add info
(demographics?) dynamically. I can only imagine this would
happen when a store is added, but perhaps I haven't thought of
another instance.
-
This was a good point: Right now, only the mall manager has
the ability to evict a store. Shop owners can close for the day
(and thus leave the simulation). However, they have no way of
shutting themselves down ("going out of business", for
instance). We need to support the self-closure option.
-
Also, a store owner may want to switch to another vacant lot
in the middle of a simulation. He should be able to do this (to see
if he would do better/worse at that location). This should all
be autonomous (separate from the mall manager).
-
User may also want to open more than one store in a
mall. How do we display that?
-
This is another thing that the customer thought of when he
saw the mock-up: a store owner should have the ability to select
adjacent lots and make them into one large store (i.e. Bath and Body
Works, Express, and Structure are one big store but three adjacent
lots). When the owner vacates the store, though, it will be
again represented as multiple lots.\
-
In mall creation, lots are simply lots (not pre-defined as
restaraunts, retail shops, or department stores). The users
decide what they would like to put there. For example, anchor lots,
like department stores, are defined when a tenant moves in.
-
Building a store - we haven't really talked about this.
The customer mentioned that a store owner should be able to layout
the store - shelves, aisles, displays, kitchens, etc. Design
should be modular (??)\
-
Representing sales - However we decide to represent sales,
the "sign" should be prominent so that all shoppers know what is
going on. We then talked a little about the placement of sale
items in the store (and how it would affect sales)...
-
Big question: Does store/mall layout affect the likelihood
that people will enter and shop in stores?
-
The customer again emphasized that this should be like playing a
game.
Other design issue:
That's basically it. If you have any questions, please let me
know.
Kijana
Notes from meeting with DXN 2/19/2003
I presented the customer with the prototyped interface for the mall
manager. This prototype had an improvement over the version we
ran user tests on. In the demographic entry window, we expanded
the category fields by default so that the user can more easily see
where he is to enter the data. In the previous version, the
categories were collapsed and people were confused about what they were
supposed to edit). In this meeting, I let the customer play with
the interface and answered his questions about the
functionality. The following issues came up:
- Slightly confused with the back arrow on the
wizard window. (Jeff: this was not an issue in the user testing)
- Asked if all characters (spaces) could be used when
entering information (name, mall name, etc.)
- The "Load Existing Layout" button in the mall
creation window wasn't intuitive to the customer. It is too
similar to the "Open Exisiting Mall" in the first wizard window.
Suggestion: rename the "Load Existing Layout" button "Load Template"
because that's essentially what we're doing.
- If the user wishes to add categories and fields under the
category (ie: Add an income level category and then add more income
ranges), he should be able to. Need a way to dynamically do this
(add to demographics and products
list). I don't think this is something we've thought about much
because we were focusing on having standardized input (would make things
easier for us). However, the point came up that this is like a
game, and if the mall manager wants to put an alien race as an option
under the "Ethnicity" category, he should be able to do so. The
circumstances may change and the user may want to update his demographic
information. Make it flexible.
- Currently, the ethnic info category is titled
"Race". It should be "Ethnicity".
- Here is something we
can think about: Dr. Nguyen hinted that he would like the
following
- The ability to have the demographic
information interweave to become more useful to shop owners. By
this, I mean that if a certain population has a particular preference,
store owners can tailor their inventory/menus to better serve the
shoppers. This would definetely make the application a bit more
realistic because this is information that people find useful. If this
doesn't make sense, perhaps Dr. Wong can clarify (please?). I
told Dr. Nguyen that we would think about this one, but I don't know
how plausible it is. (Statistics?)
(SW: The point
is to be able to view or specify demographic or behavior information
as a subset or slice through existing demographic
information. For example, [input set] = {Asian
Americans over 50 years old and with incomes over $35000/yr, and
Caucasian Americans over 60 years old with incomes over $50000/yr}
implies an [output set]={ owns a Lexus or Mercedes and eats northern
Italian food and drinks wine over $20/bottle}. This
sort of data mining technique is very useful for both specifying
demographic and behavioral information as well as seeing what
relationships exist. This is definitely not a first-cut
issue, but it does point at the level of abstraction needed when
specifying demographic and behavioral information.
- Store owners should be able to see this demographic
information before they choose a lot. We had not put that into
the store owner wizard.
That was basically it. If there are
any questions, please let me know. Kijana
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