Week three and I'm starting to resent these long posts I am writing. I beginning to remember the same feeling during GDO710, with the constant need to fill it with nuggets of insight and comment on every aspect of the course content. I had a look back at these posts, which were from a year ago now, and noticed in a week 5 post on SMART GOALS that I planned to reduce the posts to 7 minutes reads maximum, which I struggled with then, and looks like I'm struggling with now. I need to ensure I reign it in to ensure I don't burn out. Instead of setting a post length, perhaps I should restrict the writing of a post to one night? This would ensure I would be more disciplined and concise. I would also mean the posts would be more focused on my reflections rather than regurgitating facts from the course literature.
SMART GOAL
I will ensure that each of my reflective posts takes no more than a night to write. This will keep my writing focused, relevant concise. I will be able to tell I have achieved this by posting the same night at starting. I will ensure this is the norm for my posts by the end of the module.
This week started off with a brief introduction and the immortal lines, "You are not your user!". I feel I've heard this statement enough times now that it's starting to lose its impact. I feel this is something that would be a given by this stage of my studies, but I have to remember that I am doing these modules out of order, so I'm closer to the end of my journey than most who do UXO720. Perhaps this does need continually reiterating to ensure there's no complacency and slips when it comes to this point.
Personas
The content then launched into personas. Having already done personas for both GDO710 and GDO730 I felt like I should be in good stead for this week, but I was surprised how the process was covered in much more detail. I felt Clementine made an excellent point about keeping personas alive. It's all too easy to forget about them once they've been created or just relegated them to the most memorable parts. They're a tool, no different from the rest, and should be referenced throughout the design process.
The persona template provided in the course slides this week will really help when I come to build out the persons. I've done these enough times now to know most of the information, but they are not set in stone and I've seen plenty of variants to cause me to second guess and slow my process down. By sticking to the template I should, in theory, stay focused. I love the fact the Scenario is baked into the persona template so all the information is in one place.
Jobs to be Done
I like the idea of Jobs to be done and I'd never heard of it before. It's a way of thinking about the higher purpose of why people use a product or service. The example in the video was keeping a lawn's grass short, which can obviously be done via a lawn mower. However, it could also be done via genetically modified grass seed that stays perpetually short. This reminded me of the concept of Goal-Directed Design by Cooper (Cooper 2014:15). Cooper refers to the difference between Goals and Activities - If the goal is to travel from St. Louis to San Francisco quickly, comfortably, and safely this would be achieved very differently for to travelers from the 1850s and modern times. In the 1850s this would translate to a covered wagon for speed and comfort and a shotgun for safety. In modern times, this would be on a jet and the gun would be regarded as the antithesis of safety. The idea is the goal is the same but we should look beyond the current status quo on how to deliver the solution.
Supplementary content
Looking at the supplementary content this week I hadn't heard of the "imaginary friend" persona mentioned by Aurora Harley on the NNG website before:
[ Imaginary-friend personas ] personas that you dream up without any basis in the real world may describe the users you hope to get but will not reflect the way people actually are. Design for somebody who doesn’t exist and you’ll have no customers.
(Harley 2015)
I wondered if I had been guilty of this in the past. I tried to remember the last two times I had made personas; one was based on assumptions (GDO710) and one was based on secondary research. It dawned on me that I hadn't actually created a persona yet based on primary research methods, so this week will actually be the first.
Another article by NNG related to Empathy Maps. I couldn't work out if they came before or after the personas. The website made me initially feel like it came before, but further reading said if you have multiple personas (Gibbson 2018), there should be one empathy map for each. Empathy Maps seem very similar to Affinity maps from last week but with a strong focus on the four sections of Feeling, thinking, doing, and saying (figure 2).
Another article I found very interesting was the one by Indi Young. In it, she defends her stance of not adding demographic details to a persona as this might create biases (Young, 2016). At first, I found the concept of removing these difficult to implement. The persona becomes more abstract and less relatable, but maybe that's the point. There's a temptation to make the persona too relatable so that decisions are made on a design without running it by the persona because "you know it instinctively". In this case, adding the demographics could also reinforce biases and stereotypes. But my initial thought still stands, how do you create a persona without these? Indi answers with first-person personas which read more like a story than a fact sheet. This is a great idea, but I worry I will be at a disadvantage as I'm not a natural storyteller. However, I will give it a go but maybe in the next module.
SMART GOAL
I will create a first-person persona in a similar style to Indi Young before the end of the course.
I also found it interesting regarding the naming of a persona. Indi mentions "The Grumbler", a term her team adopted to refer to one of their personas. Framed in this negative light the team struggled to build empathy for it and it wasn't until it was reframed as "The Frustrated", the team was able to relate and move forward. I never considered before a simple name has a huge effect on the team's biases and perceptions and I will definitely take this into consideration in my practice.
User Flows
I shan't go into too much detail regarding user flows, I know we have to make one this week based on an app we've used recently. They seem pretty straightforward, and there really weren't any surprises in the video content. As I mentioned in the webinar this week, I can see them being a great tool for cross-departmental communication before a single layout has been fleshed out as they share such a common language with flow diagrams in general. I do like this technique that deffer the visual discussions later on in the process and allows teams to focus on the flow, structure, or themes rather than the visuals which are much more opinion based. The video also mentioned Storyboards and this is something I'm keen to practice. Storytelling in UX is something that I want to explore and a recognized area of development (I'd say weakness, but I'm trying to stay positive). Between GDO730 and UXO740, my coursemate Claire Burns and I gave each other a couple of hours of tutorials on subjects we felt we had something to share and the other was interested in. I taught Claire a few techniques in Adobe Illustrator and she talked me through the storytelling process. I know it's not an exact match for storyboarding but narrative-based UX is a concept that illudes me at times. I even tried reading The Users Journey by Donna Lichaw (2016), but I felt the concept of mapping a narrative to the UX process was a stretch. Storyboards seem like a much more logical place to me to add this level of narrative, to explain a concept, not apply it to a concept directly. I'm hoping I'm exposed to some material soon that challenges this viewpoint but we'll see.
I also feel like I need to break out from the weekly challenge activities at some point in this module but they're so relentless that I can only seem to commit to the ones set rather than techniques not asked to be demonstrated. This makes it sound like I'm moaning about the volume, and maybe I am. I need to remember that not all of them are going to be needed for future projects and I'm being exposed now so I can use them more discerningly in the future.
References
GIBBSON, Sarah. 2018. Empathy mapping: The first step in design thinking, Nielsen Norman Group. [online] Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/ [accessed: 6/2/ 2023].
HARLEY, Aurora. 2015. Personas make users memorable for product team members, Nielsen Norman Group. [online] Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/ [accessed: 6/2/ 2023].
LICHAW, Donna. 2016. 'The Users Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love'
YOUNG, Indi. 2016. Describing personas, Medium. Inclusive Software. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/inclusive-software/describing-personas-af992e3fc527 [accessed: 7/2/ 2023].
Figures
Figure 1: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Jobs to be done framework
Figure 2: CLARKE, Daniel. 2023. Empathy Map framework
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