Scenario - John

The actor:
John Smith

The environment:
The small garden outside John’s home

The time:
Early morning, around 9:00 am, on a sunny Monday, mid June

The task:
John is one of the individuals using the EasyTrim tool. John decided to use it to prune the orange trees in the small garden.

The need:
John wants to take care of his orange trees, he is neglecting for so long. He has to start by removing dead, injured, diseased and crossing branches, suckers and branches growing downward. Orange trees usually respond well to hard pruning, and John wants to see his orange trees increase their production in fruit.

The story:

John found the day exceptional sunny and since he was feeling good he decided to use the newly acquired pruning tool, EasyTrim, to prune his orange trees in the small garden outside his house. He has already used it once for pruning on a different occasion, with great success and he is quite pleased with the tool’s performance. Still, today he is putting it in a greater challenge, since he knows by firsthand that pruning the orange trees is one of the harder gardening tasks he has to deal when taking care his garden.

John, having used the tool before, knows his operation very well, and he has no trouble handling it. He removes the tool from the plastic cover case, removes the safety catch and releases the safety button. He finds the first tree to prune and by pressing the button that triggers the spinning saw, he cuts off small branches with ease. However when he tries to cut off one of the thickest branches, he runs into the first difficulty. The branch has a diameter wider than 2cm, and the saw is just not wide enough to cut the branch all the way through. The safety cap comes in contact with the body of the branch, disallowing the saw to cut any further. John is forced to move himself on the other side of the branch, find the exact point where he was cutting, and continue the cut basically rotating the saw into the gap he created before.

This requires extra effort and time on behalf of John, since several branches of the orange trees have diameter a bit wider than 2cm. Still, John is determined to finish the pruning today so he continues to use the tool, even if he occasionally faces some difficulties. Nevertheless, as John continues to uses EasyTrim, it seems that the saw is losing power. Eventually, after some time of usage, the saw stops to spin, despite all the tries of John to press the button next to his thump harder. John is wondering what the problem might be but sooner or later he figures it out. The batteries of the tool need recharging. Although he has not finished the pruning, he decides to postpone it for another day. He packs EasyTrim and heads back into the house.

The outcome:
Although John was pleased with the overall performance of EasyTrim, he found some difficulties when having to cut branches a bit wider than 2cm. The tools cutting saw must then be refined to accommodate this situation, since a citrus tree garden is quite likely to have trees with thick branches such these. Also John found difficulties in managing the power resources of the tool. The main problem was that he was not aware of the battery charge levels, so he couldn’t estimate the working time he had available.