Week 5 – 31/03/20

---

Lecture Pods Summary

The lecture pod this week covered the following topics:

User Personas:

• User Personas are the represented goals, behaviours and motivations of a hypothetical group of users.
• More than one persona is created for most designs, however there should be one primary persona.
• User Personas include age, sex, occupation, hobbies, preferences, and other details related to the product – things such as behaviour, goals and environment/context.
• There are many factors in User Personas:
• Core Audience vs. Fringe Audience: The Core Audience is the audience to satisfy first, and is where your persona should be focused.
• Small Audiences still need personas – these personas are able to be used across multiple projects and are versatile.
• Another factor is the task (or the WHAT) your user is performing, and whether or not different personas would be doing different tasks.
• What part of the task are you designing? The beginning? Middle?
• What devices are the users using? Mobiles are common with younger users, for example, but desktops may be more common with older audiences.

Mental Models:

• The thoughts a user forms around an idea or activity.
• They illustrate how a user works around different problems, as well as their expectations for different interface.
• Including these things in personas allows for a more correct and cohesive user flow and site structure.

Artefact Personas:

• The discussion of the personality of the project, taking it away from personal likes/dislikes and giving it a strong visual communication system.
• Asking the questions: if this product was a person, what would it be like? What celebrity or car would it like? How would you recommend it to a friend? How is it different from competitors? How would you expect users to react when first seeing this product?

Reflection

The lecture pod this week went over what we did last week in the tutorial – User Personas. Because much of the pod was a revision of last week’s work, I felt it could have been shorter while maintaining its key points. However, I did think the examples shown and the explanations of them were informative and gave greater understanding of what a good user persona or artefact persona does for a product.

I did learn from this lecture that understanding who you’re designing for is absolutely crucial when creating an interface – the user personas guide the creation of the product, as they are your target, and the artefact personas add the personality the product needs in order to reach that target and those people. Creating a product with the two personas in mind is important in creating something with longevity and meaning.

Below is an example of a user persona: