Design Event 1: UX and Bagels 7, User Personas

I attended a UX talk regarding user personas on the 27th of September. It was an eye opening experience for me as I learnt the importance of personas and how it helps with the design process tremendously. Personas are very controversial, where there are debates saying that they are not real or coherent (characteristics or needs of 5 people are summed up together). However, usually in the user research phase, there will be so many reasons and frustrations each user face that it seems very difficult to piece together a solution that fits all problems, therefore having a persona makes it much easier and guides you in answering the right problems.

The important parts of a persona are the needs/goals and behaviours. A persona helps designers in objectivising decisions, so instead of “What I think works”, personas will help to ask “What might work for Bob?”. The solutions that designers come up with will thus be unbiased and without influence from their own thoughts.

We had a short practice session about going to the supermarket to purchase groceries. The attendants were all split into groups and we all chipped in. We wrote our reasons for going to the supermarket, what groceries we bought, how frequently do we go to the supermarket, our behaviours while at the supermarket, what we disliked and many more. We realised that we had very similar reasons and we can group all these ideas together into specific categories, such as by convenience, preference of physical store rather than online, what we wanted to buy and by visiting frequency. We spotted that all the points we gave falls under the big categorisation of prioritisation. Some of us go because of convenience, while others go because they wanted to physically see the quality of the food before making a purchase. From the short session, I learnt that it is very productive to use sticky notes to conduct research as you can group them together easily and see where the main issues we need to address are at.

At the end of the talk, there was a networking session. I talked to a UX consultant and shared with him the problems I faced in conducting user research for assignment 2, and was curious about how they actually conducted research for their clients. He offered very helpful advice and shared that it is actually better to physically interview someone rather than doing survey as many people dread survey and may fill in falsified data just to get through the survey quickly.

A proper interview is way better in achieving quality data, however the interview must be made to be casual and comfortable for the interviewee, to allow a natural process of probing to occur. Sometimes when the interviewee is very comfortable, he or she may share things which you did not account for and might help in the design of the solution. Another thing the UX consultant advised is to have someone with you while you carry out the interview. Focus on asking the right questions while the other person should be helping you take down the important information.

He also strongly emphasised that I should prepare a list of questions which are suited for different scenarios. For example, “Have you used this functionality of the application before?” If the interviewee has never used even the application before, there should be countermeasure questions like “Why did you not use the application, tell me more. But have you heard of it? Will you consider using it now that I tell you it exist?”.

Overall the event has given me a clearer view of how the user research phase should look like and I hope to practice them in the near future.

(Some photos from the event)