Documenting Evolving and Growing users
Being a human also means being in a continuous loop of ever evolving mindset and ever growing abilities. Evolution is part of life where mental, physical or social. Factors like different interactions, environment and culture shape our mental evolution.
With more and more user researchers trying to document and find the absolute “Personas” for a brand, it is important to capture this mental evolution as well. People models are a reduction of user study at the current moment and their journey with a brand, but this journey is shaped from two factors: history of interactions +mental evolution.
Stages of Change Theory
This theory states that there are five stages of change:
- Pre-contemplation — Unawareness about the experience that is being perceived
- Contemplation — Realise that there was a problem and something needs to change
- Preparation — Decide and set-up their mind with intention of change
- Action — Take an action to change
- Maintenance — Evaluate the change and keep evolving
As designers, we always capture the factors that affect our users behaviour like thoughts, feelings and actions and how they align with the core beliefs as seen in the image above. However continuous brand engagement means capturing evolutionary users and constantly coming with these changing behaviours. Here is an example of a documented changed behaviours.
As novice users try engaging with services and getting started on them, expert users are ever developing more better, easier and efficient ways of getting things done. It becomes essential to cater to this experts otherwise they will find new and better ways of working and ultimately exit the service. Hence, it become important for brands to not only cater to on-boarding new customers but also grow with their existing users.
