Response to User Research
Design Ethnography & User persona
Design ethnography is a set of methods to understand the behaviors of the users and the cultural context they are in. This process is designed to offer designers a better perspective of the users related to their design. Specifically, the designers are supposed to know a enough number of users, observe their daily activities and conclude data analysis from the observation. During this observation, everything needs to be observed and recorded in “context”: users’ physical environment, mental model, habits and relationships(social networks). The best way she suggests is to conduct contextual inquiry by doing ethnographic interviews and observations. For the interview, she gives out some good tips for the introduction, body and conclusion of the interview. She also expects designers to prepare very well and ask the users a number of good questions.
“User Persona” is a fictional type of people from the data you collected that represent the users’ general behaviors and needs. Persona helps to keep an empathetic mind set and consider the needs of users as priorities in user-centered Design. The confusion designers might possess is that design targets are same as market targets. Often the one that contribute you the greatest in the design process may not be the one that gives you the most profit in the sale. A danger the persona creates is that sometimes designers make up characters. These personas do not actually represent their actual users. A true persona needs to be supported by observations of real people and interviews. This gap between persona and real users could be mitigated by more observations and improvement of understanding the users.