Personas & Storyboard
Written by: Sally Jo
Week 3: Analysis of Our Needfinding Data
What do people do when they stumble across a word that they do not know the meaning of? Most people nowadays can agree that a physical, handheld 10pound dictionary is obsolete when there is the World Wide Web just at our fingertips. Based on our need finding data after conducting roughly 21 interviews, almost all of our participants’ solutions to the question at hand was one simple word: Google. Whether they were reading an online news article, a fashion blog, or a Biology textbook, it was the most convenient to pull out their phones or use their laptops to type the word into Google search. After this step, only a few would care to jot down these words and definitions onto their notepads. If they did not have pen and paper, they would manually enter the word into their digital notepad with the intention of going back to it later. Then finally, there were also those who would try to memorize the word on the spot or create a mental “save it for later” type of to-do list in their heads. As our class consists of many students who are Cognitive Science majors, we have all learned that we can effectively boost our working memory by rehearsal so that new, meaningful information can become stored into long-term memory. Thus, after analyzing our need finding data, our group members agreed that we should build a vocabulary app that is convenient, simple to use, and can promote effective learning for personal or academic success.
Generating Personas & Storyboards
Then came the fun part! Utilizing what we learned in class about the three “S’s” of storyboarding- Setting →Sequence →Satisfaction, we all created our own distinct personas and three storyboards to match. We purposely did not share our illustrations until we came into class on Monday so that we wouldn’t influence each other’s ideas or initial approaches for the assignment. And sure enough, our personas ranged from high school students, undergraduate students, postgraduate students, to young working professionals. Below are some of the personas we came up with:
And here are some of our storyboards that illustrate the action sequence:
Sharing our individual visions played a huge role in our creative, development process. We were able to see that our app will ideally help users accomplish goals such as: ace exams and get good grades, practice effective learning strategies, and allow the user to save a task for later by a simple tap and save or by telling Siri. By being able to visualize our user goals, we feel confident and excited to tackle the next part of our task, which is prototyping our app!
