Assignment Phase 2: Synthesizing Results

Once your research is completed, recorded and collected your team will need to reflect upon the results as a team and attempt to synthesize the results into a collection of goals, patterns, opportunities and questions that could inform a design. This synthesis must also take a form that can be communicated to the rest of the class and your instructors. In doing this you will also practice a technique for turning this research into a representation tool that interaction designers in industry use to humanize their data and remind them of the core goals and principles driving their design.

Designers often condense and synthesize the broad range of results and impressions gained from these types of user-studies into artifacts that the entire design team can use to focus their design efforts and stay on task with regards to their users needs and abilities.

Two of the most common of these artifacts are Personae and User-Experience Maps and in this week you will practice creating Personae

persona example

Instructional Readings: Before you synthesize your research and make your personae documents, please complete the following readings to help flesh out your understanding of these design tools.

An Image of a man reaching a goal

Personas, Why and hoow you should use them, Dam, R and Sam, T. 2019.

UX-Lady-Persona

Better Personas: One Simple Change to Help Mitigate Bias, Thompson, G. 2017.

Recommended Process and Required Formats

Your final product for this week will be a (roughly) 5 minute slide presentation that attempts to communicate the following...

Briefly summarize your research findings in your presentation slides using images and graphics documenting the research to support your statements.

Consider:What did you find out from your research methods? What are common goals of people in your research context? What are common tasks and activities? What are common stumbling points?

Briefly analyze your research findings for interaction design opportunities.Don't try to propose a bunch of solutions right now as that will form the bulk of the next weeks but try to identify some broad areas of focus

Briefly reflect on your research experience. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the methods you chose? What were the gaps in your research outcomes? What would you do to fill these gaps?

Create 3 personas as 3 digital slides that synthesize and represent the results of your user-studies and interface explorations. Ensure that one persona represents a primary (intended user), one represents a secondary (potential user) and the final persona represents the stakeholder. Try to ensure that the information on the personae are organized into clear categories and presented in a fashion that is readable and would allow you or a design team to quickly refer to it and use it as a resource when designing for your interactive system.

To do this: Work together to wireframe a layout for a set of digital persona slides that will communicate the details of a set of single personae.

Remember that wireframes allow you to quickly plan a layout that can be used as a framework that allows a design team to work together to create a cohesive design. Work with your team-mates and plan your persona poster layout, information hierarchy and core information elements that all your personae should share.

Synthesize your research data into the type of information your persona should include. Remember the information categories described in your readings and in lecture.

Such as: Goals, Motivations, Skills and Experience, Interaction Triggers, Possible Touchpoints, Frustrations, Environmental Factors, Experience Goals, Life Goals, etc.

Create two primary personas from this synthesis. Each persona will be similar but should have key differences that can spark different design opportunities. Start by simply writing out all the information for each persona as text before creating the hi-fidelity persona design.

Create a separate list that will form the data of the stakeholder persona. Note that the stakeholder isn't quite represented as a person as much as the first two are. The stakeholder in the case of this project could be the company that makes and sells the app, or it could be the app itself. Because the stakeholder isn't a person the categories will be a bit different. I intentionally want you to consider what categories might be appropriate for the stakeholder but it will still be driven largely by goals. What does the owner or app's primary end goal? Do they have concrete experience goals? Are there things that must always be done or never be done? Are there any guiding principles that drive decisions and design? Are there common behaviour patterns and habits or skills that are integral to the app? How could you use the format of personae to communicate these?

Turn your text personas into digital persona slides based on the wireframe you created with your team-mates.

Create a short pdf slide deck that communicates all of this information while also introducing your chosen application, its purpose, features, patterns, and user personae. Be prepared to present this information in lab. (5 Minutes)