1 User Personas and 3 User Stories(600 words)

Phase 1 Deliverable

1. Project Charter ○ Project name: Follow My Steps ○ Problem statement:

Sometimes when we travel, we know the attractions, but don’t know why it’s attractive. Even after reading the history of the place, it still didn’t interest us. However, a fan of a singer, novel author, or a celebrity, may find interest in the places they have visited. Especially the places that their import events occurred.

○ Brief project description: For users who want to travel and have generally decided the travel destination, but have no idea what attractions can be visited meaningfully, this app provides a direction that suggests tourists to follow celebrities’ steps and stories to tour a city. Users can choose a specific celebrity’s footprints, read the short story of the person related to this place and decide whether to visit the attraction.

○ Project outcomes: The final deliverables would be a running back-end server along with an Android mobile app. This app provides services for users to browse the information on a map base, filter specific attractions by celebrity, like and mark on attractions.

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2. The Case for the System (Product) ○ Need for the system (Product)

■ Why do we need this product? What purpose does it serve? The app recommends the footsteps of specific celebrities for users who want to travel and have a rough idea of where they want to go, but don't know which places to visit in a meaningful way, read short stories by people associated with the place, and let the user decide whether to visit the attraction.

■ Who are the main stakeholders and end users? Stakeholders: Dr. Hooshangi, team members. End Users: Traveler who wants to have a quick idea of the trip theme. Travelers who use smartphones to assist their trip. Target audience in North America.

■ If your system is an app, why does it have to be a mobile app (not a desktop or a web application)? Mobile apps help us build competitive barriers, our competitors (or other individuals) will not be able to easily access our data through web crawlers or copy & paste, and all app interactions will be encrypted through tokens and then transmitted via API. When developing mobile applications, developers take advantage of the fact that smartphones are primarily touchscreens, using touch handlers to give the user the sensation of touch. So, compared to web apps, mobile apps will look and feel good to use, and we want users to be able to use the app anytime instead of going to its website specifically.

○ Current market

■ What are the other systems that have goals similar to your system (mention some examples)? Tripadvisor is one of the mobile apps that is very similar to our system. But instead of recommending restaurants or tourist attractions in the city based on location, our app will focus on recommending places that celebrities have been to.

■ What criticism you have about them? One criticism we have about the existing apps in the market, is that they’re not focusing on recommending places that celebrities have been to. For example, they recommend restaurants or tourist attractions based on any location. But if tourists just want to follow the footsteps of celebrities, they have to manually sift through a huge amount of information, which is very inefficient.

○ Competitive analysis ■ What is "new" about the system? Is it the idea, or is it the way it

approaches a solution that already exists? The idea of a tourist attraction is not new, but our idea for this mobile application is to include attractions that all celebrities have visited, so users can follow celebrities’ steps to travel. This app will make it so that users can track where their favorite celebrities have traveled. In doing this, it will give users an idea of where the hottest spots to travel are, given that celebrities visited those areas. It will make a great way for users to potentially meet up with any celebrity they wish.

■ How do you think your system will be different or better than existing products? Our system will be different from other existing products because of its ability to track locations where celebrities have visited. There is not an application in today’s world that will hold some of the features that ours will. It will be better than existing products because everyone wants to meet some of their favorite celebrities, and so it will be widely used. I genuinely believe that this app can generate a large amount of revenue.

3. System Description ○ Technical, Business or Administrative Problem Addressed:

There might be a technical problem of how to collect the celebrities’ travel data. Our original idea was that we could have an administrator enter this data manually, or we could let the users enter it, and the administrator would do the review. The downside of this approach, however, is the high cost of large amount of data inputs. Or, we could use a web crawler to crawl data from social media, but whether that works remains to be seen. Also, we might take advantage of the

APIs that the social media platforms provide, such as Twiiter API. If we accept user-reported data points, we still need an administrator to review them.

○ Dataflow Diagrams (DFD) – Context, Level-0 (Provide only two levels)

○ Assumptions and Risks There might be other ethical risks of this project. For example, how to protect people’s privacy. How to verify the accuracy of information. What if this app has been abused?

4. Team Dynamic ○ What skills do your team members bring to this project?

Our team members have some experience in database management, mobile application development, back-end, web development, and business.

○ What skills are missing and you'll need to learn to deliver the system? We need an approach to collect the celebrities’ data from the Internet. In order to do that, we might use web crawler, which is a skill that we are missing. Moreover, we also need other technical methods to maintain data.

○ How are you planning to obtain such missing skills? There will be web resources to teach us how to use web crawler, like open courses and books.