&

Dr Sultan M Al Khatib

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Define

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  “Process and synthesize the findings from your empathy
work in order to form a user point of view that you will
Design Thinking address with your design.”

User – Centred  A point-of-view (POV)

Design  Reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement
 Launch you into generative ideation.
 Allows you to ideate in a directed manner, by WHO, WHAT, WHY questions
(The process) based on your POV and Brainstorming. [USER] needs to [USER’S NEED]
because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]
Define  your responsibility and opportunity as a designer is to discover and articulate
the meaningful challenge , so to captures your design vision.
 Example: A teenage girl with a bleak outlook needs to feel more socially
accepted when eating healthy food, because in her hood a social risk is more
dangerous than a health risk.

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  Personas
Design Thinking  Personas were informally developed by Alan Cooper in the early
’80s as a way to empathize with and internalize the mindset of
people who would eventually use the software he was designing.

User – Centred  In order to bring user profiles to life, they are often transformed
into a number of personas (Cooper, 1999).
Design  Personas are rich descriptions of typical users of the product under
development that the designers can focus on and design the
product for.
(The process)  They don't describe real people, but are realistic rather than
Define idealized. Any one persona usually represents a synthesis from a
number of real users who have been involved in data gathering.

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  Personas
Design Thinking  Each persona is characterized by a unique set of goals relating to
the particular product under development, rather than a job
description or job role. This is because goals often differ between
people within the same job role, and people with very different job
User – Centred roles may have the same goals.

Design  As well as goals, a persona will include a description of the user's

skills, attitudes, tasks, and environment. These items are all
specified in some detail, and so instead of describing someone
simply as a competent sailor, they include that he has completed a
(The process) Day Skipper qualification, has over 100 hours of sailing experience
in and around European waters, and gets irritated by other sailors
Define who don't follow the navigation rules.

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  Personas
Design Thinking  Each persona has a name, often a photograph, and some personal
details such as what they do in their leisure time. It is the addition
of precise, credible details that helps designers to see the
User – Centred personas as real potential users, and hence as people they can
design for.
Design  Usually a product will require a small set of personas rather than
just one and it may be helpful to choose one primary persona who
represents a large section of the intended user group.
(The process)  Personas are used widely in industry, and have proved to be a
Define powerful way to communicate user characteristics and goals to
designers and developers.

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  Personas
 The style of personas
Design Thinking varies widely. The
example in the Figure
illustrates the persona
format developed and
User – Centred used for quite a compact
Design and eye-catching layout.

 Writing Persona (Our case

(The process) is someone who wants to
know, do, understand,
Define locate, or ask something
about our very BAU in
person or using our
website!)

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  How Are Personas Created?
 Interview and/or observe an adequate number of people.
 Find patterns in the interviewees’ responses and actions, and use
Writing those to group similar people together.
 Create archetypical models of those groups, based on the patterns
Persona’s found.
 Drawing from that understanding of users and the model of that
understanding, create user-centered designs.
 Share those models with other team members and stakeholders.

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  What Are Personas Used For?
 Build empathy. Creating a persona is crafting the lens through which
the designer will see the world and gain a perspective similar to the
user’s. It is having internalized the persona’s goals, needs and wants by
the designer.
 Develop focus. Personas help us to define who the software is being
Writing created for and who not to focus on. Personas will help you to prioritize
which users are more important than others. You can’t design for
Persona’s everyone, or at least not for everyone at once — or else you risk
designing for no one.
 Communicate and form consensus. Personas document helps to
communicate research findings to people who were not able to be a part
of the interviews with users. Establishing a medium for shared
knowledge brings all members of a team share the same understanding
of their users, then building consensus.

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  What Are Personas Used For?
 Make and defend decisions. Personas help to prioritize who to design
for, they also help to determine what to design for them. When you see
the world from your user’s perspective, then determining what is useful
and what is an edge case. When a design choice is brought into question,
Writing defending it based on real data and research on users (as represented by
a persona) is the best way to show others the logical and user-focused
Persona’s reasoning behind the decision.
 Measure effectiveness. Various implementations of a design can be
“tested” by pairing a persona with a scenario, similar to how we test
designs with real users. If someone who is play-acting a persona cannot
figure out how to use a feature or gets frustrated, then the users they
represent will probably have a difficult time as well.

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Research &
User Stories /
Scenarios
 Defining your user. Follow what a user would go through.
 Know their age, their language, their familiarity with the system
you are trying to design.
 Target users will be familiar app users and social media users.
Probably fans or against it.

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  A scenario is an ‘informal narrative description’ (Carroll, 2000). It describes
human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion
of contexts, needs, and requirements.
 It does not necessarily describe the use of software or other technological
support to achieve a task.
Writing  Imagine that you have just been invited along to talk to a group of users
who perform data entry for a university admissions office. You walk in, and
Scenarios are greeted by Sandy, the supervisor, who starts by saying something like:

 Well, this is where we process admissions forms. We receive about 50 a day

during the peak application period. Brian here checks the applications to see
that they are complete, that is, that all the information and supporting
evidence has been included. You see, we require evidence of relevant school
exam results or work experience before we can process the application.
Depending on the result of this initial inspection, the applications are sent on
to . . .

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  Telling stories is a natural way for people to explain what they are doing or
how to achieve something (goals). Understanding why people do things
and the process of achieving their goals allow us to concentrate on
activities rather than interaction with technology. A scenario that might
be generated by potential users of an online movie rental subscription
service is given below:
Writing  Say I want to find a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. I don’t remember the
Scenarios title but I know it came out in the cinemas around 2006 or 2007. I go to the
service website and choose the director option. A huge list of directors is
displayed – I had no idea there were so many directors with surnames
beginning with S! After scrolling through the list I find Martin Scorsese and
choose to see further details about him. Another long list of movies
eventually leads me to the movie I was looking for – The Departed. As an
existing subscriber, I need to log in to be able to rent the movie. Once my
login has been confirmed, I can choose the rental period and payment
method. I have my preferences already registered in the system, so I just
choose the defaults and download my movie.

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  In this limited scenario of existing system use, there are some things of
note: the long lists of names and movies that the user has to scroll
through, the lack of detailed search possibilities, the importance of choice
around rental period, and the usefulness of having default settings chosen
by regular users.

Writing  These are all indicators of potential design choices for the new system.
The scenario also tells us one (possibly common) use of the system: to
Scenarios search for a movie by a specific director when we don't know the title. The
level of detail present in a scenario varies depending on where in the
development process they are being used. During requirements it is a
good idea for scenarios to emphasize the context, the usability and user
experience goals, and the tasks the user is performing. When used in
combination with detailed personas, this kind of scenario can improve the
developers’ appreciation of the user experience.

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  The difference between personas and scenarios can be difficult to
grasp at first. Although reading about it may seem clear, it is a
Scenarios and common confusion to end up combining the two. A scenario
describes one use of a product or one example of achieving a goal,
Personas while a persona characterizes a typical user of the product. The
following Figure captures this difference graphically.

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Scenarios and
Personas

 Note that this figure introduces the notion of a scenario goal. Thinking
about the persona's goal for the scenario helps to scope the scenario to
one use of the product.
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