Milestone 5 > Scenarios > Steve McMahon

It's another cold but sunny October day in Ann Arbor, the sun has been up for a few hours now and Steve decides to finally leave his bed to head over to the business school within the next hour. He walks down the stairs of his student apartment, which he shares with another second year business student and a second year public policy student.

Over breakfast he hears his roommate talking about this great instructor that holds a lecture on public policy and economics this coming winter semester. He had taken it last year and really enjoyed it. While tasting the great German strawberry jam, that Steve got from his grandmother - he starts thinking about next semester and which classes to take. This class over at the school of public policy really seems interesting.

Steve swallows down his morning coffee and leaves the house to catch the 11am bus in front of his house. His head still hurts from last night's house party down the road. 20 minutes later, Steve arrives at the Ross and walks straight to the library to check his emails. His computer at home is still not working and so he has not checked emails for about two days. After he logs on, Steve browses a few business news websites where he stumbles across a Forbes article on America's smartest cities. Ann Arbor is 3rd following Boulder and Bethesda; he is amused and forwards this link to his friends in Boston and New York. He opens another tab to check his emails at mail.umich.edu. One of his 69 unread emails stands out, since it says IMPORTANT in the subject line. It comes from the student affairs office. For some reason those emails look always so messed up when he uses the university webmail service. By the way... what does horde actually mean? While trying to encipher the content of the email he stumbles across the line reminding him to think about his winter schedule and that he will be able to register for classes soon.

Oh well, that means he will have to decide which classes to take and use this confusing bidding system again. He does not delete that email and decides to do it right away, since he has about 30 minutes until class starts. He skips printing this page, since he really does not care about carrying around paper and trees in Alaska are being cleared way too much.

Back on the Ross website he remembers a tool that one of his classmates recommended him to easily browse courses and descriptions. He forgot the name, but the homepage has a teaser that looks like it could be what he is looking for. After authenticating for iMpact the next page that opens is called CourseNav... what a catchy name - he likes it. Too bad those university computers don't let him store bookmarks. He will have to remember it next semester.

He starts browsing through the welcome page of CourseNav and sees a few boxes about top rated courses, most tagged courses and a course of the day. Steve picks a course from the top rated courses that is about trade and financial consulting.

Right away he notices, that this tool provides way more information than the old Ross webside did. It seems to be similar to the Facebook interface and very intuitive. The navigation and search box are where he would expect them to be... There is even a little shopping cart like icon on the top.

The course details page has information about the semester this course is offered as well as credits and ratings. He is curious about the ratings and checks out the details. Based on the content and the ratings he likes the course and decides to take it this semester. Because he wants to keep browsing the CourseNav tool he would like to save this course for later. Maybe the shopping cart icon is some kind of a wish list, to save classes for later. Steve decides to add the course to his Wishlist, so that he can access it later when he needs to register using wolverine.

Than he Steve wants to use the search function to find the class his roommate recommended to him. He does not remember the exact course name so he starts typing in keywords that he remembers. Shortly after he starts typing a dropdown box shows up, that has a list of classes related to his entry. After submitting this search term eight matching entries show up. By using some adjustment tools on the side he can refine his search and limit it to departments, terms and careers. The list is now down to four entries and he checks the details page for each of them. The last course has a detailed description and looks like the one he was looking for. He adds this course to his wishlist and thinks that it would be cool to forward this course to his friends in case they are interested as well.

Steve notices tags assigned to each course. He is not sure what those tags mean, and where they come from. He decides not to trust random keywords and ignores them.

He also notices, that he had already taken one of the courses in this list and thinks that this is odd to see it in the list of courses. But he decides to look at the details and scrolls down to the ratings. He really liked the course and the instructor so he wants to leave some feedback. He wonders if his identity will be saved with this rating, but does not worry about it for now, since he will be leaving positive feedback.

On the top of the page a box with recommended courses shows five courses that might be of interest to him. He clicks on the first entry and is being taken to the details page of a class called AGR-132 that is not related to his studies at all. Surprised, that this course would show up as a recommendation he decides to rate this recommendation as "not helpful".

Steve looks up and the clock in the library shows 12pm, time to head over to the auditorium, his class starts in less than 10 minutes. He logs out of the computer and walks out the doors.