Welcome back. With this class, we start looking at the concrete strategies that designers use to translate the wealth of formative research that they have collected into a concrete design artifacts that they can then use to advance their design solutions. With this lesson, we start with the first of those which are personas. So, what is the purpose of personas? The purpose of personas is to translate the formative work that designers have collected. They welcome information about users and their contacts into concrete images of potential the users of the technology that they can use then to design tool as they work forward in the design process. The reason the personas are done is that all of us have the tendency to design for ourselves, and to think that our needs are the needs of our users. So, one of the cardinal rules of interaction design is that you are not your user, and that we really need to as designers constantly stay conscious of the fact that we are designing for other people who could be very very different in many ways than we are ourselves. Personas are intended to make that process of staying aware of that easier. So, what are personas? Persona is a fictional characters that represent key types of technology's intended users. They're based on information that is discovered through the formative work, and digested into an image of fictional people that can be used as a shortcut to refer to potential target users of the new technology that is being developed. What are the key characteristics of personas? Well, the first one is that they are based in data, and this is a really important point. So, we're not just making up characters out of thin air. Personas are basically digestion of formative work. They are digestion of the work of research that was collected, and they represent the designer's best understanding of who the target users are going to be. As such, they embody the various goals, traits, behaviors, and contexts that could influence if and how the technology is going to be used. So, the point here is that we are pulling out of the formative work, the various characteristics that we have discovered in our user group that are going to be key to understanding how they would use the technology, and what opportunities and barriers they would experience while using the design solution that is being developed. Finally, personas represent distinct class of intended users. So, in any given design project, you're likely to have multiple personas that refer to different kinds of users that you're trying to reach. The reason to do that is you can easily envision the various classes of users to whom you are designing, and can then be sure that the design solution that is being developed is working for all of them. So, let's look at a couple of examples of personas. I'm going to present you with two personas that I developed as design tools to help us think about design of an intervention that can help individuals who have recovered from a heart attack, reintegrate into their daily lives, and continue to be physically active as they can go back to work and continue their daily life activities. So, the first one of these is Mary. As you see on the slide, she's middle age woman 49 years old, who lives in a suburban setting, who is a project manager for a technology firm, and who lives with her child. If you look at this particular persona, what you see is that we have some demographic information about Mary. But then the rest of the persona is really focused on the motivators and constraints that would affect her technology use. So, we have a few points about things that motivate Mary. So, things like professional success, being a good mum to her 10-year-old daughter. She is really driven by novelty. So, Mary doesn't like really wrote routines, and she is constantly looking for new experiences. She's highly motivated by social contact. So, she like to both have people over and interact with people in a work setting throughout the day. In terms of constraints for both using a technology and in this particular case for physical activity, a key one is that she lives in a suburban environment. She doesn't get very much structural physical activity because she has to drive everywhere. Her workdays are packed with meetings. She has very limited free time in the evenings, and she has high technological literacy. So, all of these various pieces of information tell us a little bit about what kind of a technology for encouraging physical activity might or might not work for Mary. Let's look at another person. So, here we have John. John is older. He's in his late 60. He used to be a mechanical engineer. But he is now retired. He lives in a smaller town in the Midwest with his wife. Again, a little bit of demographic information about John, and then we move to the motivators and constraints that would affect John's use of technology. So, what we see here is that one of the key things that is motivating John at this point is to stay healthy as long as possible. So, he doesn't want to be a burden on his children. So, he want to be able to continue being independent. She likes spending quality time with grandchildren. He love to continue to learn. He is really interested in things that will allow him to continue learning about things he doesn't know. Whether is a constraint on how physical activity he can be. Midwest gets really cold winters and really hot summers. So often, it's either too cold or too hot to exercise outdoors. He does have a stationary bicycle at home. She has a strong need for structure and routine. So, unlike Mary, John thrives on routine. He often travels to spend time with his grandchildren. Unlike Mary, his technological literacy is moderate. So, he is not going to be a sophisticated user of a technology as Mary is going to be. So, with Mary and John, we now have two examples of potentially very different target users for this intervention for encouraging physical activity. The way these would be used is that as a designer, as I'm continuing to work on this particular piece of technology, I would be constantly checking my design ideas against these two personas. I would be asking myself, is this something that would work for John? Is this something that will work for Mary? In what situations would it work for Mary and when would it fail? So that as I go forward, I will have a mental shortcuts for the kinds of people that I'm trying to reach, and would be able to evaluate my design ideas in respect to whether those ideas would work for these intended target users. So, just to systematize what we've seen a little bit, let's look at the main elements of a persona. So, as I mentioned, demographics ends up being often something that is put into personas just to provide a little bit of concreteness for who these individuals are. So, you would often include things like age, technological literacy, and if it's relevant to the kind of living environment that they're in. So, are they city dwellers? Do they live in the suburbs? Potentially socioeconomic status, issues that might affect how they would be using the technology. A core component of every persona are things like goals and motivators. So, these are issues related to how the technology would be used. The goals that these individuals would be pursuing using the technology, and motivators that could be leveraged to help them use the technology, or that might act as barriers to technology use. Behaviors such as routines and work practices are often included in so far as their things into which technology can be integrated, or again if they might act as barriers to technology use. Finally, contexts such as living and working environment and other aspects of physical and social contexts might be relevant to determining technology use. So, all of these can be integrated into personas. The exact categories that we put into persona will vary by designer. But regardless of how these pieces of information are packaged, most personas will have information about multiple of these elements that you see here. So, let's think a little bit about what the benefits of persona are. Again, their main purpose is to personalize and summarize a lot of data from the formative research. So, they allow designers to digest a wealth of information that they've collected about their target users into representations that are easy to think about, and that allow them to focus only on the central pieces of the collected data. They provide the mental shortcut for design considerations. This is one of the really nicest parts of all using personas in the design process. So, as you're working through the design process, you can always ask, "Would Mary do this? How John react to this this particular feature?" You have a vivid image of who Mary is and who John is. You can typically answered those questions relatively easily. They allow discussion of an agreement on who the intended users are. So, this the communicative purpose of personas. In most complex projects, there are multiple people involved in the design process. They are the designers, they are programmers, they are other stakeholders both on the business end and on the target user end. Personas provide a way for designers to communicate with these other stakeholders to make sure that everyone is on the same page about who the intended users are. So, as they summarize the research that has been done up to that point, personas allow designers to have conversations with other stakeholders, to make sure that everyone is in agreement about who the intended users are, and who the intended users are not. The concreteness of the personas enable this kind of communication. They are also easy to understand by non designers, and that's what makes communicative role of personas particularly powerful. They help check tendencies of the designers to design for oneself or what is often called the elastic user. Namely, this notion that as we design features, we can always convince ourselves that users are actually slightly different than who they really are and would be able to accommodate the design decisions that we're making. So, having a concrete and constrained representation of target users allow designers to check those tendencies and really say, "No, actually Mary would never do this. We better rethink this particular idea." So, some final considerations. One thing that really is important to keep in mind is that personas should feel real. They really should accurately summarize available data. So, these are not made up characters. Yes, in a sense they're fictional characters, they're not direct copies of any one individual that designers work with in their formative work. But, they are summaries of that work. In that respect, they represent types of real users that the designers are trying to reach. Second, personas should always try to focus on common rather than idiosyncratic characteristics. Often when we do formative work, we encounter one or two people who have something really unique about them that is relevant to the design solution that we are trying to develop. Even though those features end up being really vivid in our minds, they often don't represent our target population as a whole. To keep a check on the tendency to have those vivid characteristics really guide the design, persona should really focus on the common characteristics of our target users. So, we're making sure that as we're designing, we're designing for the large majority of the people that we are trying to reach, and not just those who happen to have something that is relatively rare. Finally, as you go through your research materials and decide what aspects of that you're going to incorporate into a persona, it's important to keep in mind is that often you will have a lot more information about the individuals you've interacted with, then is strictly relevant for forming the design decisions that you're trying to make. So, personas should only contain the kind of information that will really help you make design decisions as you develop your solution. There is going to be a lot of information there that you just won't be able to use for the purpose, and personas are not a right place to put that. To summarize, personas are a useful design representation because they allow us to keep our target users in mind throughout the design process. They are vivid, they're easily conjured up in mind. As such, they provide a quick way for us as designers to check our design decisions, and make sure that the proposed design solutions are meeting the end needs of those users. Finally, as they are concrete artifacts that can be shared, and that are easily understandable by everyone on the design team, they allow the whole design team to be synced up about who the users are and what their needs are. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.
