Seminar #4
Title: Persona Exercise
Week of Feb 12th 2024

Introduction

Goal oriented design is driven by design for users with specific goals. These goals are the root cause why a user wishes to use the software. Satisfy the goal and you satisfy the users. What are the goals and who are the users.

Summary

Alan Cooper broaches the subject of interaction design from the perspective of personas. Personas guide the design by carefully defining who the users are, and what they do. Persona development is determined by analyzing to task domain, the user dimension and incorporating behaviour and habits.

Objective   

Let us consider a shopping application to aid shoppers in getting the most bang for their buck. A shopper goes into a store to purchase a number of items. Being frugal they wish to only purchase items which have the absolute lowest price for that item in the current store. E.g. Can of Beans in store A is $0.89, v.s. $1.09 in store B. They will then go to a 2nd, 3rd, or possibly an infinite number of stores until they have effectively purchased all of their items.

As part of the design, you are to analyze the people who are involved. As an exercise during seminar, you are tasked with determining A) domain B) people involved (dimensions, behaviour, habits). C) development of personas which represent these people. D) determining the primary persons.

This exercise is limited to persona development. The design of the interface is outside of the scope of this seminar.

Readings

Participation

The seminar will be a directed exercise on the development and implementation of Persona design. Students will be asked to work in groups during the seminar.

Marking

Marks will be awarded for presentation, preparation and participation in the discussion which exhibit emulsion into the subject matter. Students who do not come prepared can expect a low participation mark.