Project 2 Shopping — Crits
We are going to improve user experience in Winchester’s shopping mall. We wanna know if this mall was to offer a free smart phone app that provide information about the mall (promotions and discount etc.), how appealing would this be to customers. We hope make shopping easier and maybe more fun. There are many strategies to boost sales and improve customer loyalty. We used the easiest and most cost-effective way to gather large quantities of customer feedback through a satisfaction feedback survey. Collecting feedback is crucial to improving business because it provides the team with a better understanding of customers wants and needs. It can also help identify their levels of satisfaction with the products or services. Additionally, analyzing customer feedback to identify what business improvement need to be made.
There are four main parts of my Engaging Personas and Scenarios:
Preliminary data collection
We did a survey and divided questionnaires to learn actual users’ shopping behaviors. We collected feedback from 50 people who agree to help us. Interviewed customers and observed their activities when they were shopping. We picked city center to do the research due to its size and variety of shopping behaviors that emerge there.

Analysis of data
The next step is analyzing research findings. Based upon my initial research, I created a form to show the data. The goal during this step is to find patterns in user research data that make it possible to group similar people together into types of users.

Engaging personas
Make some fictional characters based on real users and group them as a combination of a subset of the participants. Meanwhile, find our potential users and then decided the final number of personas based on this research.
My personas include the following information:
- Persona name
- Character illustration
- Demographics ( age, occupation, location, Weekly Expenses)
- Goals and needs
- Frustrations (or “pain points”)
- Behaviors that capture the personality
From that, I came up with the following 3 personas. Each persona is a reference model representative of a specific type of users. Creating personas help us fully understand the needs, experiences, behaviors and goals of specific groups. And it can also help us to identify who we are designing for and get inspired by their specific life and challenge.



Since going shopping is so universally popular, it might seem at first that the answer is ‘everyone’. But we should realize experience is personalized to every single user. So I created a better understanding of existing and potential users. I want to find how to differentiate the needs of these customers and the problems our products could solve for them.
I used flat illustrations with bright colors, giving them a more abstract look. It was also much easier to reproduce in high or low fidelity, since sketching a specific pose or picking a color palette would be enough to refer to a persona. Don Norman put it this way: “[personas] only need to be realistic, not real, not necessarily even accurate (as long as they accurately characterize the user base).”
Early in the analysis, I noticed that people’s needs or reasons for going shopping were consistent, even in different clusters — that is, to buy things. But what was different was their attitude towards promotions. Some of them keen on looking for the best price on something, however, others think saving money is too much hassle. They don’t have time to hunt around for deals. As a result, I ruled out the idea of clustering based on needs alone. Then, I coded and clustered them into needs, attitudes towards voucher-codes , shopping habits, and other dimensions in order to identify the best cluster combinations.
Scenarios for problem analysis and idea development
Prepare situations or scenarios for my personas. Situations are the basis of a scenario. I gave each of my personas life by creating scenarios that feature them in the role of a user. Personas have no value in themselves, until the persona becomes part of a scenario.
Customer Journey Map
Before the Customer Journey Map, I’ve already done some preparation prior. I choose one typical user’s story and captured her journey. This customer journey takes place in one week. I found some customer touchpoint and got a clear understanding of what are the customers doing and how are they doing it. Then, I took my sketches and make them into something useful. In addition, produced journey map that is visually appealing and useful to stakeholders.

Some say personas are absolutely necessary and some don’t think much of them, but I think it depends on how you collect your information.
If you find your users, talk to them and observe them you get a pretty good idea of what they want, how comfortable they are with technology, and how they might interpret a software interface. When you take these findings, compile them into an easy-to-reference visual, your user comes close to having a place at the table. In a way, they can help you to design for them.
