Basics Interactive Design: User Experience Design: Creating designs users really love by Gavin Allanwood & Peter Beare

Author:Gavin Allanwood & Peter Beare [Allanwood, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474238724
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

4.2 Harvesting keywords

‘Make Bradford British’ was a series by British broadcaster Channel 4, which explored identity and nationality. The series was accompanied by a microsite with quizzes and interactive elements. Numiko created an application to harvest keywords tweeted by viewers during and after the broadcast, who could then see the words constructed into a dynamic Union flag.

Personas

The activity in Chapter 1 (see here) is designed to reveal that designing for a diverse group of users in a range of situations is not an effective approach. In trying to create an interactive design that ‘works for everyone, everywhere’, a design team is most likely to create something that ‘doesn’t work very well for anyone, anywhere’. This is because the need to accommodate such broad requirements will result in either too much complexity or too little functionality in the design.

A better tactic is to target a small group of individual users located in appropriate contexts and to design just for them. In this way it is possible to focus on accommodating user characteristics that are similar. This approach makes the design task much less complex and the goal of creating a good user experience for the defined group much more achievable. Interestingly, the results of this approach often give an acceptable user experience to a much more diverse group than the target group defined by the design team.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional description of a model user based on high-quality user research of actual users in the target user group. It will include details about the user’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, attitudes and patterns of behaviour. The persona will have a name too, allowing the design team to ask each other questions like, ‘When does Sally have time to check her email?’

To allow for a range of users within the target group, it is generally considered necessary to create a number of personas (usually fewer than six). This allows the design team to consider differing characteristics such as aptitude, motivation and the context in which the interactive design will be used. Sometimes it may be useful to create personas of people who are not users but who are affected by the design. An example of this could be a parent who may be interested in the educational value of an interactive game for their child.

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