...Through user personas.
This method/tool is used in user-centered design an marketing. The personas are people that represent different users for a product/shop/service. The tool brings together lots of information about similar people and is then presented in a single character. In my personas I decided to focus on occupation, background, hobbies, pain points and influencers. That way we could maby get an insight of problems in the different processes of their journey as a buyer and maby even give some new ideas of how the company could develop new values.
Pruitt and Adlin (Pruitt, John & Adlin, Tamara. The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. 2006) said that the use of personas offer several benefits in product development. Through this designers could get in touch with "real people" and what they really need. Keep in mind though that I did feel the need to criticize this tool. Usually the tool can be used in brainstorming with a group where they come up with fictional characters. I just don't understand how that would be of much help. I would rather interview real people on the street than sit around and fantasize about fictional customers. I wanted to go out and talk to people.
The project felt easy and I was determined to get in touch with real people and come up with real user personas. I don't know what happened but this was much harder than I thought. To begin with a lot of people simply ignored me. Is it really that terrible to talk to people? I planned to use about an hour or so walking around a store talking to people but I ended up having to ask for help from people i knew just to get in touch with customers.
Below you can find three different user personas for department stores in Finland.
Ps. Read the book.
Janina
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