Personas, Scenarios, & Features

Due on Wed, 02/05 @ 11:59PM. 10 Points.

Goal of the Assignment

In this assignment you will build on what you learned during your interview / observation activity in P2, in order to make your analysis actionable. Specifically, you will to identify a set of personas, scenarios, and features.

1. Your personas will be fictional embodiments of the users you observed and interviewed.
2. Your scenarios will help you to concretely talk about the kinds of goals that your users will accomplish by interacting with your system.
3. From these personas and scenarios, you will identify a set of features that your system must include to effectively support the personas / scenarios.

Report

Your team will create a PDF document that includes the following sections:

Personas

A profile of each of the personas that will motivate your eventual design. Aim to document between 3-6 personas. For now, each persona should be about a half-page, and include the following:

1. Photo
2. Their life story: including name, age, occupation, hobbies, where they grew up, what they do on weekends, etc.
3. Some description of their needs, aspirations, dilemmas, etc. (as they relate to your eventual design)

Here are some examples of constructing personas, to give you ideas:

• JustInMind Template
• Invision

Scenarios

A description of current scenarios as well as ones you hope to support in your future design. One paragraph for each scenario should be enough. Aim to document between 4-8 current and future scenarios. Some things to keep in mind:

1. Each scenario should incorporate one of your personas. In other words, you need to make it clear which user (i.e. persona) your scenario pertains to.
2. Each scenario should communicate the user’s goal, and the steps they need to accomplish to reach that goal, but should not explain how they would do it in your app (do not talk about the solution yet). NO SOLUTIONS: Keep it generic. You will shift into solution mode next week.

Here are some examples of some ways that you can communicate a scenario:

• @CanvasFlip (Medium)
• Usability.gov
• Lecture slides from Wed, 1/29

Features

Describe the features that your system will need to support in order to account for / address the actions described in the scenarios. Break your features into two categories:

1. essential features: Ones that must be supported to meet your users’ needs. These are features that you will definitely need to implement by the end of the quarter.
2. nice-to-haves: Ones that could allow your system to more effectively support your users’ needs, for example by increasing efficiency or making the user experience more enjoyable.

Each feature should describe an interaction or action that your system should support, but should not mention specific solutions yet. Remember Norman’s Paradox of Technology (to be covered in class on Monday): supporting too many features can make a system unusable, so think carefully about your project scope and choose wisely.

Submission Checklist

Submit your report in PDF format. Make sure your team name, team members, and section are at the top of your submission. Please ensure the following criteria are met:

1. Personas: Report describes 3-6 personas which are rooted in team’s user research. Personas are concrete representations of your users.
2. Scenarios: Report describes 4-8 scenarios which are rooted in team’s user research. Scenarios describe how particular users might use your system to accomplish some task.
3. Features: Report describes “essential” and “nice-to-have” features to support. All of the “essential” features are motivated by at least one of the scenarios.