2. MS Teams — Personas and Scenarios
“Specific design targets are chosen from the cast of personas through a process of comparing goals and assigning priorities based on how broadly each persona’s goals encompass the goals of other personas. A process of designating persona types determines how much influence each persona has on the design’s eventual form and behavior.” (Cooper et al., 2014).
Our approach for the creation of personas had tools such as questionnaires (Google Forms), surveys, and assumptions. Due to the pandemic, many people of our personal circles had changed the way they work.
The reason we decided to explore in more detail the “Teacher” persona was the accessibility and possibility of running tests with easiness. To do it so, we condensed the personas that each of us created, in a specific persona, Rachel.
However, we had another actor in common, described below:
Other personas that we had in our process, you can check here.
Empathy Map
“Empathy drives behavior. It is so much more than just understanding another person or seeing their perspective. (…) Empathy is the ultimate form of understanding.” (Greever, 2015, p. 44).
The empathy map was of interest to know whether our decision persisted trustworthy to our persona and motivations throughout the entire process.
Journey Map
It was created with the merge of two journey maps. The Journey Map made feasible a deeper analysis of our actors, applying a realistic sequence of events on which we wanted to frame a solution.
Scenarios
“The goal of a storyboard is to tell the story of your key experience(s) visually.” (Levy, 2015, p. 135)
We created scenarios that could illustrate our personas performing their activities. It was crucial to keep the user as the centre of our process.
To see more scenarios, click here.
User’s Need Statement
“Shared understanding allows our teams to make decisions faster and empowers us to engage in more strategic conversations” (Gothelf & Seiden, 2016, p. 5).
We created our user needs statement from our personas, tasks and empathy maps.
We followed the pattern [A user] needs [need] in order to accomplish [goal].
Thoughts about the process…
Users’ goals are often quite different from what we might guess them to be.” (Cooper et al., 2014, p.13)
I had a shallow perception of what could be the users’ goal when teaching online. It changed after talking and looking for real people. When discussing it with my group, I realised that I had a task, not a goal in mind. I put in the first place a solution, instead of my user.
The creation of a persona was essential to bring focus to the user again and discover his/her goals.
It was a comprehensive path, and it allowed us to come up with ideas that could be validated by teachers. Instead of a detached solution, we learned the need for transforming the experience of giving online classes from the teacher’s perspective. Even though we had started basically with assumptions, it showed useful once it passed for the stages of refinement.
Assumptions have value while giving a direction; however, they must be used cautiously. The researcher must fight the tendency of believing that is enough. It is vital to iterate as many times as possible and seek adequate information. In our case, it was easier because we were working on a team.
Bibliography
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014). About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th ed.). Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Wiley.
Gibbons, S. (2018, December 9). Journey Mapping 101. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November, 2020, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/
Gibbons, S. (2019, March 24) User Need Statements: The ‘Define’ Stage in Design Thinking. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrived October, 2020 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-need-statements/
Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2016). Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Levy, J. (2015). UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Preece, J., Sharp, H. and Rogers, Y. (2019). Interaction Design: Beyond Human- Computer Interaction (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
