Personas and Scenarios

We created personas and scenarios to humanize the research findings. In order to effectively digest the information from field research, we created “individuals” or “personas” in order to better cater to a user’s needs — as it is much simpler designing for a person (imaginary or not) than it is for a table of numbers. They are people with characteristics and traits backed up by the research findings in the earlier section. Their general attitudes, expectations and behaviors are listed in their profile, as well as a picture to better visualize the persona.

In essence, personas allow us to more easily visualize user attributes, desires, and expectations

Scenarios are stories that these personas would likely be involved in and give an extra human touch to these imaginary users, detailing things such as how and when the product will be used, and what kinds of conditions/problems will these users come across. The most important thing about a scenario that separates it from a simple use-case is that we identify the behavior that users will have in the situations they come across. These different personas helped guide us towards certain design paradigms that we would need to focus on in order to best appeal to our targeted user base.

These scenarios had a major contribution to design sketches. Many of the ideas we came up were directly addressing these persona’s needs in the scenarios. For example, we came up with the idea of a watch app in the design stage that evolved into a full-blown watch wire frame to address the need of Quinn, one of our personas, who had a preference of easy-to-use and fancy gadgets.