EBoard 07: Personas

This class will be recorded! Its use will be limited to members of the class. Please do not share with others.

Approximate overview

• Preliminaries
  • Administrative stuff
  • Q&A
• Personas
• Interview exercise
• Investigation 3 group writing time

Administrative stuff

General Notes

• Happy Friday! I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
• Be responsible.
• I have not yet caught up on grading. I’m hoping to do so this weekend.

Upcoming Activities

• CS Table Monday at Noon.
• Dialogue on processing racial fatigue Monday at noon.
• CS Extras Thursday at 5pm: Michael Spicer on Regulating the Internet and Machines: Creating Sustainable Social-Machine Relationships in the Digital Age
  • Learn about ethics and responsibility!
  • YOU can make a difference. Learn how!

Changes to schedule

• Investigation 4 will mostly be conducted in class. You’ll write up the investigation on your own. (Does a weekend work?)
• We’ll have a visitor next Monday.
• Still working on them. Feel free to send suggestions.

Questions/guidance for visitor

• Grinnell journey and how it led to where they are.
• What are the “tools” you use in your own work. For example, what role, if any, do personas and scenarios serve?
• What does your work like on a day-to-day basis (and other scales).
• We can’t agree on UI vs. UX. What do you see as the differences?
• What are the teams you work on like? What roles?
• What do you do when you run out of ideas?
• How do you keep track of all the trends?
• How did you end up in HCI?
• Tell us about some projects you’ve worked on. (If you can.)

Work for Monday’s class

• Investigation 3: Users and their tasks.
  • Teams are posted on the Investigation 3 channel on the class team.
  • Investigation 3 channel
• Investigation 4: Usability testing.
  • Pairs are posted on the Investigation 4 channel on the class team.
  • Investigation 4 Channel
  • Monday: 20 minutes for planning
  • Friday next: Class time mostly devoted to interviewing other class members. (Sam thinks he can work out the schedule, or maybe Mai will.)

Work for next Friday’s class

• Write your scripts for your usability test.
• Readings TBD

Q&A

Do we need to meet with our investigation 4 partner over the weekend?

Nope.

Do we know our partner for investigation 4?

Posted in the Investigation 4 channel.

https://teams.microsoft.com/_?tenantId=524f9e3e-faca-4f64-b3ec-adb2baee8807#/conversations/Investigation%204%20-%20Usability%20Testing?groupId=d003196b-1954-4805-a759-17273e7a225d&threadId=19:9cc4c7a53bf247e480b4acac1f9e5273@thread.tacv2&ctx=channel

Personas

What are personas?

• A model personality of someone who might be using our product. Their age, gender, background, other information about them.
• May also want to think about their relationship to the product; their goals, etc.
• Assumptions about what they know, etc.
• May have different levels of depth.

Why do we have personas?

• They help us have conversations across different teams. They help communicate goals and important features.
• They let us think about “the other”, particularly as we create scenarios.
• Help consolidate demographic information into something that we can more easily use.

What are some of the downfalls to using personas?

• They can marginalize people who are not part of the persona-d population.
• They may lead us to generalize and stereotype, so they may not even be accurate for the demographics we hope to model.
• Different people may interpret a persona differently. How do we achieve a common understanding? Should someone represent the persona? (Personas are subjective.)
• Personas may not represent our actual users.
• Designing a persona requires particular skills that not all of us may have. (And many people try to create them without those skills.)
• You can’t really validate a persona.

What alternatives are there to using personas?

• Use real human beings, which allow us to go beyond our imagination.
  • Still has problems of marginalization.
  • Hard to find representative real human beings.
• Write scenarios without worrying about particular users.
  • But then we are more likely to focus on our own perspective, rather than those of others.
• Write personas in a way that we can measure the characteristics.
• Don’t look for alternatives; accept that you are generalizing. Be vigilant about the tradeoffs.
• Accept that everything is flawed. You have to pick something.

How do we avoid the downfalls?

• If we’re using personas, how do we avoid marginalizing certain populations? (One obvious one: The disabled.)
  • Identify people in the marginalized populations and interview them to better understand them. Use to build personas.
  • Create a wide variety of personas and make sure they represent approprirate communities.
  • Checklists of groups often marginalized.
• How do we avoid stereotyping our users when we build personas?
  • Collect good data about the users so that we can use the data in building our personas.
  • Work with an open mind. Hold a neutral point of view.
  • Try to eliminate the variables that variables that would treat the person unequally.
  • Have a team build the persona (ideally a multi-cultural team)

Note

• Good persona design is not cheap.
• In spite of that, it can be useful even if not perfect.

Break!

Interview exercise

With investigation 4 partner.

“What is your experience using Web Advisor for academic planning?”

• P1 initiates the chat
• Five minutes P1 interviews P2 (open-ended interview)
• Five minutes P2 interviews P1 (open-ended interview)
• Three minutes to talk about Investigation 4
• Come back and debrief

What was the hardest part of doing a short informational interview? (Other than trying to keep it to five minutes and doing it with no prep?)

• Sam designed the assignment badly, the second question should have been about something different.
• Coming up with something different when being interviewed? [+1]
• Complaints are minor and specific; how do you get on to bigger issues?
• Coming up with questions.
• People quickly move into frustrations.

What would you do differently? (Other than actually prepare?)

• Take the time to understand what they liked and didn’t like.
• Have followup questions.
• Go in well-informed about the topic.

How do you have good followup questions?

• Pay attention and pick up on lose ends.
• Rely on the generic “Tell me more about X”a.
• Prepare possible followup questions based on your knowledge of the topic.

What is something that worked really well in the interview?

• This question was skipped.

What did you learn about the tasks users have for the academic advising software?

• Find grades from previous semesters.
• Searching for classes and adding them to your schedule so that you and your advisor can plan.
• Bookmark the site.

What did you learn about the frustations users have for the academic advising software?

Investigation 3 team meetings

On our own. Twenty minutes. I hope that was enough.