Persona & Scenario

As I said previously, Interaction Design master in K3 is based on projects, so most of the time we are on the studio working together to accomplish the design goals. During the first project, around twice a week we had workshops about a specific topic. The theme for the first project was “mobile computing”  but the learning goal wasn’t only  Mobile computing interaction but also, and mainly, user centred design.

To be user-centred during the design process, is not enough thinking about “What the user wants?” if you really don’t know who the user is or if you just think about the user as a stereotype. Actually most of the people involved in a product development tend to think that the user is just someone like themselves. To fight against this trend there are several of procedures that a designer can use. One of the most famous is “Personas & Scenarios” and we had a related workshop during the first days.

Basically this method consists on creating several fictitious users based on real user research. In this way you can more easily use all the information from the user research during the whole design process.

This needs several steps:

• User research: Is a kind of etnographical approach. You should go into people life to see how they interact and what they think about your interest topic.
• Create Personas: Physical appearance, psyche, background, tastes. During this process we used a whiteboard and images from magazines to “create” the persona.
• Create scenarios. A persona by itself is not useful. He needs a motivation, a context of use. So scenarios are stories about the personas using the product. Furthermore during the different presentations we realize that scenarios are usually the best way to communicate what the product is and how it is used.

To learn about personas the teachers recommend us the following readings and videos:

• Watch Lene Nielsen’s video about “Personas and user-driven
  Innovation” during “From Business to Buttons” Conference 2008 here in Malmö.

And also these papers:

• From user to character: an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios. Lene Nielsen
• Personas: practice and theory. Grudin, J. & Pruitt,
• Interaction relabelling and extreme characters.