03/28 Personas
During Research Methods this morning, we began to develop personas for our projects after a lecture from Bruce. We came up with four main motivations for being abroad longer than a couple months: study abroad, traveler, volunteer, and business person. Each of us worked on developing one persona based on both our research specifically for this project and people we’ve met before.
Study abroad: Nicolas, a 28-year-old from Mexico, is moving to France to study architecture at a university there. He has learned French but has never put it into practice, so he isn’t fluent. He’s an outgoing person who loves traveling and making new friends; he’s usually the life of a party. He believes in making connections and having empathy for others. He wants to catch up with his French so he can interact and make new friends during his two years of study, so he keeps reading and watching French shows, books, and magazines. However, he is a bit lazy and can get distracted or bored easily if motivation is lost. He has played video games in the past but hasn’t done so recently because of the application process.
Traveler: Amy is a 24-year-old college student from Germany. She’s able to speak some English since she learned it for five years in Germany. She plans to visit Canada to see a friend and will stay in Canada for the three months of summer break. She hopes to be very immersed in Canadian culture and make new friends so she can visit again. She loves parties and social events and has a very welcoming personality.
Volunteer: Rachel is a 27-year-old nurse currently living in Queens who plans to quit her nursing job to volunteer for a year. She wants to use her degree in nursing to help in medical clinics in Guatemala City and already has a position with an organization there. It’s been a couple of years since college, where she took some advanced Spanish classes, so she wants to brush up on her Spanish; however, she needs a schedule or a structure to do so. Because of her background in Spanish, she knows that there are many differences between the Spanish spoken in different countries, so she wants to tailor her learning to be as specific as possible to Guatemala. She also wants to learn medical vocabulary to be able to interact with patients and other workers at the clinics. At the same time, she wants to be able to blend into the community as much as possible. She’s pragmatic and a planner; she wants to see value in what she’s doing. While still in New York, she stays busy with friends, running, and her dog–but she would love to spend some time focusing on Spanish as long as she can see herself improving.
Business person: Jane is a 30-year-old office worker and a native English speaker. She has never lived abroad, but her company is relocating her to Japan for three years. She has no knowledge about Japanese culture and has just started taking Japanese at a local language school. She wants to be able to communicate with her coworkers in Japanese and survive in her new environment. Long-term, she hopes to be familiar with Japanese culture and understand people.
We met this afternoon to further develop our personas and begin discussing how this could help us move our project forward. We’ve felt a little stuck lately: we’re struggling with determining the value of mixed reality (versus just virtual or just augmented), especially with the guidelines we’ve set for ourselves based on our research. Our design implications place an emphasis on relationships, true expression, an integration of language and culture, contextual practice, and conscious critical thinking. We’ve come up with some exciting concepts that are great applications of MR but aren’t particularly social or expressive. We’ve also come up with some concepts that follow all of our design implications but are more virtual reality than mixed reality. Coming up against this conundrum has meant that we’ve been unable to move forward in any meaningful way, so we switched gears a little to begin embodying our personas.
First, I talked through some of Rachel’s (the volunteer persona) activities before and after arrival in Guatemala from her perspective, pulling from some of our research interviews and friends’ stories who have volunteered in new cultures before. Nurie took notes on the whiteboard as I went, highlighting insights and pain points:
- Need to learn medical/technical terms
- Specific vocabulary for particular contexts: work (medical vocab), talking to the landlord (about the apartment), etc.
- System should have levels
- Does the system teach about emotional speaking and social context?
- Desire to be connected rather than isolated is a huge motivator
Nurie also spoke from her own experience volunteering in Vietnam, pointing out that even when you do know how to interact at a high level (for example, greeting), it’s hard to know how to respond–especially when you can’t understand what they’re saying in the first place.
Next, Nurie talked about an extreme case of a business person abroad from the experience of one of her coworkers in Seoul. While this experience doesn’t fall in our target user group (intermediate to advanced learners), it was helpful to look at an edge case for inspiration. The character she embodied was moving to South Korea for a job with almost no exposure to the culture and language. Before he left, he began learning Korean with Rosetta Stone but found it to be difficult and quickly gave up. He found a group of expats to interact with outside of work and experienced culture shock pretty quickly because nobody at work spoke English. He was stressed and isolated because he couldn’t get used to the environment and the classes he was taking weren’t teaching him quickly enough.
One of the biggest points we talked about from Nurie’s story had to do with respecting the culture. The fact that expat communities can exist as a bubble struck us as strange, and Nurie spoke from her own firsthand perspective of how she felt her culture wasn’t being respected. It’s so easy for people who don’t understand a particular culture to be disrespectful by accident, and it’s also easy for people to isolate themselves in expat communities where they’re comfortable. How might our solution best help people respect the cultures they’re moving to?
After walking through these two personas’ experiences, it was evident that most of the pain points come after arriving in a new environment. While learning about the language and culture before leaving home could definitely alleviate some of the pain points, motivation is much lower. There is so much to do before leaving, like arranging travel, housing, and other logistical matters (not to mention spending time with family and friends before moving away), that learning about the language and culture becomes a lower priority. Could our solution also be used once our users have arrived to help people learn and be connected? The users’ motivation might spike after arrival since most things have been arranged and they have firsthand experience with their language and culture awareness/ability.
Moving forward, we will each write a couple scenarios with our personas in mind to prepare for bodystorming.
