User evaluation; resulting changes

User Evaluation:

Melanie was thrilled with the job I did. In fact, she wants to throw me a party for reuniting her with her daughter.

She did not have any complaints. She did not exactly have any changes in her information needs. The specific information she wanted progressed, however. As we answered some questions, Melanie wanted the answers to more:

For instance, when I first located Jennifer on Classmates.com, Melanie was asking me for information that was not posted on Classmates and was not mentioned in Jennifer's e-mails she sent through Classmates. Information we still did not have after that initial contact was what Jennifer's contact information was. Melanie was also speculating on what Jennifer's attitude toward her would be after all these years, wondering what Sam had told Jennifer about her, and wondering about details of Jennifer's and Sam's lives in the past and present. I could only tell her what Jennifer's messages said.

It was when Melanie spoke to Jennifer by phone that she filled in these gaps in her information. I also (after the fact) found partial answers through other Web resources, as I noted in other posts.

Resulting Changes:

So, the main resulting change that took place after initially finding Jennifer was that our search focused on filling in remaining information gaps about Jennifer. The nature of my assignment changed from strictly trying to locate Jennifer to comparing different people-search sites on the Internet. Another goal that emerged was to help Melanie become more computer literate.