Week 10: Concept Development
Your research task this week is to return to the initial notes that you made about your chosen Industry Set brief in Week 5.
Are you answering with the demands of the brief?
Are you aligned with your creative strategy?
Are you on-track with your project plan?
Research Task - A reminder, who am I designing it for?
Outline your thinking and working processes, and elaborate on ideas and visual experiments. (and re read the brief)
User personas - what are they and what are they used for?
How can you use personas to better understand your target audience?
A persona is a made-up character that embodies specific traits and qualities of actual users. These characters are often documented or presented visually, using a mix of text and icons/graphics, and can even be given a face, such as a custom-drawn illustration or a stock image. Despite being fictional, personas should be grounded in facts and data derived from user research and behavioural data related to the product being designed.
Understanding users
By creating personas, we as designers, can better understand and empathise with their users, helping to design products and experiences that meet real-world needs.
Visualisation
The visual representation of personas, whether through custom-drawn illustrations or stock images, adds a human touch to the design process. It helps designers and other team members relate to these personas as real people, fostering a more user-centric mindset.
Communication
Personas serve as a communication tool within a design team or across different departments. They encapsulate a user segment's key attributes and help ensure a shared understanding of the target audience, reducing the risk of designing for personal biases rather than user needs.
Personas are a powerful tool that helps humanise the design process, making it more user-centric and empathetic.
I put together some personas of my target audience for the Science Museum project
Although my personas are fictional, they should be based on facts and data about real users. This is obtained through user research and any behavioural data I may have gathered concerning the app game I’m designing.
Typically a persona includes:
Fictional name
An image (e.g illustration, avatar, photo or stock image)
Demographic information such as your persona’s age, gender, family/living situation, employment status and anything else that’s relevant to your product or problem space
Their needs and goals in relation to your product
A summary of their challenges, frustrations and pain points concerning your product
Quotes from real users whom the persona should represent
References:
UX Design InstituteWhat are personas and what are they used for https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/what-are-ux-personas/