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UX: Designing for Education
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- [FINAL] P2PU Techsprint - Barcelona Mon, 2010-11-01 15:34
- [Class 7] Final presentation Sat, 2010-10-30 04:18
- [Class 6] Prototyping/Mock-up Thu, 2010-10-28 15:46
- [Class 4] Personas-based studies Sun, 2010-10-17 21:33
- [Class 5] UX Design plan Sat, 2010-10-16 19:09
[Class 4] Personas-based studies
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Hello everyone, this is the brief for our 4th class. As this is our first practical lesson, I'll post just the specification today:
We'll need to form 3 groups.
Having the groups formed, I'll give the next instructions.
Thanks!
João
Am I correct in assuming we should form our own groups? I will propose a semi-random method. There are 13 students in the class (not counting our peer instructor Joao), so we need 4-5 students in a group. If we count off by most recent posts as of this writing, we could divide it like this:
Group 1: Tracy, Eugenia, Will, Lita, Natan
Group 2: Matt, Logan, Lars, Alfonso
Group 3: Brylie, Andrew S, Nanda, Andrew B
Would that work for everyone?
Tracy
Hey there, Tracy! Thanks for helping us out suggesting the groups.
This sounds very good for me, does anyone have any objections?
Cool! I have no problem at all.
So, what do we do next?
Ha! Now the mystery will be solved! :) First of all, we need some introductions:
1) What is a "Persona"?
A: A Persona, when referring to the Design methodology, is the mental model of a character that represents a specif kind of user or a group he/she belongs to. As of a mean to facilitate the design process, the Personas-based exercises can be ludic - you can give names, build fictitious scenarios or define general traces of personality.
2) What about an example?
Sure! As I told before, you're free to define the depths of detail you want about your Persona - in this case, the more complete doesn't mean better. Sometimes, having a short and objetive profile is much more efficient, speciallly because you may have to study lots of different personas.
Ex: Peter is young lad who lives in downtown Toronto. He's starting his college studies about Music. Even having some limitations to his hearing abilities because a recent health problem, he is determined to study Classical music. His university is in Japan. He'll have to live there and adapt himself to the new language and culture.
What did we learn from this persona: He's in transit(so it would be nice to have digital classes available online, from desktop to mobile), he studies music (so he needs listening activities), he has an specific disability (so we need to improve usability tests), he would get better adapted if there were minimal linguistic obstacles (as English x Japanese aren't related gramatically speaking).
So, this is our activity:
--------------------------
Class 4 - Exercise 1
Analyze these Personas and try to extract the maximum information possible from the description. After knowing the user really well, propose a short UX design plan that can fulfuill his/her needs.
GROUP 1:
- The University of Barcelona is searching for a tool to manage the "Urgent Surgeries" subject for their Medicine school. Initially, they just need to save some PDF files to a virtual disk, but any form to value this interface is welcomed.
GROUP 2:
- Kate is American. She is a low-middle-class student. She doesn't know which course to take yet: Law school or Linguistics. She likes to write but doesn't fancy reading long texts very much - so she thinks it might be difficult to do these courses. She dreams of studying in Portugal, but she only speaks a bit of Spanish, not Portuguese.
GROUP 3:
- A school of Arts needs a system to manage student's grades and the artwork catalogue. They want the students to have their academic history available online. 65% of students are elderly people. One of their ideas is that the students could sell their artwork via this web interface.
---------------------------
Cool, just want I wanted to read more about ;) I'll posting my assignment soon.
No problem! Be sure to brainstorm the ideas as a group. If you may wish, you can use our online Chat tool.
No individual posts should be published; it's 1 post for each group. Thanks! :D
I forgot it was a group activity XD. My mistake :)
I'll send an email to my group asking how they want to collaborate, by email or chat. Joao, do you know if there is a tool in the P2PU LMS that allows one to contact more than one person at time? (I've been clicking on profiles and doing it from there.)
Thanks,
Tracy
Hey there, Tracy. You can use the "Broadcast tool" do send everybody a message.
Where do I find the Broadcast tool?
Hello everybody, our group (Tracy, Will, Natan, Lita and I) is going to share the ideas for this assignment here http://pads.dreamfish.com/2ggxcQbWVW
This is like Etherpad, an online collaborative notepad. The best part: no registration at all! You can make a new notepad for your group :)
I also posted a pdf resource about Personas by Nokia. A really interesting doc! You can find it here http://p2pu.org/node/5749/document/10216
Thanks for the file, Euge! Nokia is undoubtedly a strong reference to UX design studies, as well as Apple.
Browsing Nokia Forums I also found this study material:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/de7cd92b-f31c-4d31-b55a-...
It's a collection of 5 lectures about the basic concepts of UX Design/Interface Design focused on the development of mobile education solutions. It's Creative Commons licensed.
Thanks! I'll read it. We will post our assignment soon (today or tomorrow) about Personas and the UX plan :)
Alright, no problem ^^
Hi everybody, this is our assignment. Your comments are more than welcome!
GROUP 1:
The University of Barcelona is searching for a tool to manage the "Urgent Surgeries" subject for their Medicine school. Initially, they just need to save some PDF files to a virtual disk, but any form to value this interface is welcomed.
PERSONAS (We know that maybe 2 personas are enough sometimes, but we wanted to do a persona for each kind of user)
Medical Student 1 :
a photo: http://www.uwo.ca/tsc/images/anna_student.jpg (the girl of course :) )
name, age, gender:
Clara is a 22 years old medical student from the University of Barcelona.
location:
Barcelona, Spain.
family ties:
She is from a small town near Madrid, but she lives with a roommate in Barcelona.
profession:
Student (University)
lifestyle:
She has a very intense life, she goes to classes and study group meetings. She is doing also an internship in a hospital right now.
personality traits:
She is curious and she likes to search for additional information on the web about the subjects that she studies.
media and technology choices:
She owns a laptop and a mobile device and she has a good internet connection at her apartment. She enjoys videos and multimedia content, more than just plain text. She likes to check her teacher's assignments and news by email every night while she is on guard.
goals, behaviour or motivations in relation to life, and to your product
differentiators (what differs one persona from the other one?)
Medical Student 2 :
a photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/russelljsmith/7002467/
name, age, gender:
Cesar is a 28 year old male medical student at University of Barcelona
location:
He lives in a small apartment in Barcelona and is originally from the Canary Islands
family ties:
Cesar is married and the father of two small children. He is returning to graduate school after starting a career in medical research, which he found unfulfilled.
profession:
Medical student studying surgery, formerly worked in biology research
personality traits:
With his half-time job and his family, he barely has time to check the classes material at this house.
media and technology choices:
Cesar has attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) and finds using a text-to-speech screen reader useful to help her focus when studying documents
He uses a desktop computer and has a good internet connection. When he can also access media on his iPhone it allows him extra study time while commuting on the Metro
Medical Teacher 1 :
photo http://tickledbylife.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/oooo.jpg
name, age, gender:
Arnaldo is a 45 teacher at the University of Barcelona
location:
La Floresta (a small town near Barcelona)
family ties:
He lives with her wife in a house in La Floresta.
profession:
Anatomy teacher at the University of Barcelona.
lifestyle:
He travels every week to Barcelona by train to assist his classes.
personality traits:
He is very demanding with his students, so he likes students that do some research about the subjects before going to classes.
media and technology choices:
He enjoys reading with his iPad when he travels by train. He loves to give his classes with some technology behind (photos, videos, animations) so he searches through the web recollecting material for his students.
Doctor (surgeon) 1:
photo http://silverdocs.com/media/images/films/lg/The-English-Surgeon-large.jpg
name, age, gender:
Pedro is a 62 years old surgeon.
location:
Barcelona
family ties:
He lives with his wife in a big house outside Barcelona.
profession:
Heart surgeon at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. This hospital is related with the University.
lifestyle:
He travels by car to the Hospital everyday.
personality traits:
He is an old man and he enjoys having a lot of time for her wife and grandsons.
media and technology choices:
He just use a regular cell phone. He is not a tech fan at all, but he has a laptop at his office because he needs to send a report after every surgery and to fill some documents such as clinical histories, etc.
PROPOSED UX DESIGN PLAN
This is just a short UX design plan. There is a iterative loop between the design, the prototyping phase and the testing phase. This is not an strict order and some phases can be made along other stages.
Research, Knowing the user, identifying the users group (design research)
Defining the concept of the product/application (Conceptual design) *
Interaction Design and Prototyping *
Visual and information design
Testing and evaluation *
PHASES
Research, Knowing the user, identifying the users group (design research)
Quantitative (studying and analysing data around specific features, users, or behaviours) and qualitative research (understand the circumstances around user behaviours and motivations)
Qualitative research:
Discover existing user behaviours associated with certain tasks (e.g. search for information during his/her trip to the univiersity, search for information at home or at work) We can do this using: observation, interviews, role-playing ("we are the users", although I would be careful with this) and other tools like maps, photos, etc.
Quantitative research:
Assess the potential market reach (e.g., the number of students who search for info, nr. of teachers who use the information of the surgeries for their classes, nro. ofdoctor that provide information).
Quantify behaviours related to our proposed product (e.g., how many times each day studens-teachers-doctor search-provide information, etc.).
Defining the concept of the product/application (Conceptual design) *
The goal of this stage is to synthesise the insights and information gathered throughout previuos research and brainstorming phases and begin to mould these into a product users (students, doctors and teachers) will *love*.
Brainstorming phase
Crazy sesison with a ton of ideas around the concept. Then we should filter them, and again until we have just a few good ideas.
Sketching the ideas
This will allow us to quickly depict ideas visually.
Defining personas and scenarios
We know what is a persona, now we need to insert those personas into scenarios. Scenarios are stories describing a set of circumstances that may occur when our product is in use.
Interaction design and prototyping *
This will enable us to validate, test and evolve our design based on real feedback. The test results will help us determine which of the product’s features, interactions, or elements require further exploration. We should document all this interaction design process through task-flow diagrams, wireframes, navigation maps, technical sketches or diagrams and prototypes.
Visual and information design
Visual design takes place at many stages of product development and includes aspects such as layout, information design and animation. This phase is very important in learning systems design. We should not forget that strong information design promotes usability. We should concentrate on how to design the information for our 3/4 identified users.
Testing and evaluation *
Testing, evaluation, and quality assurance should be an ongoing process and should include both usability and software testing.
To finish this assignment I would like to ask everybody about how detailed a persona's information has to be. I've seen short descriptions and large ones.
More details help you to know your user better?
Hi there Euge.
In my personal opinion, it's up to the designer to choose the level of details he/she wants to study. There's two basic kinds of user-focused analysis: the classical audience research, which is very academic, and the Personas-one, which is also academic but allows you to focus creativity on building the characters, and it´s some sort of scapism: as you have a lighter approach when studying the user, the next steps of the design process tend to get lighter as well.
My personal evaluation to GROUP 1 assignment:
1) Building the characters
- The idea of having topics about the user universe was very clever. It keeps your analysis organized.
- Adding the function of an internship to the character was interesting, as it immediately restrains the times available to study, as well as level of daily concentration - as she'll be mind-tired.
- She's familiar with the web universe - as she likes to do her researches online. There's also the intelligent contrast between Anna and Pedro.
- Cesar is an interesting case of study as he has the ADHD.
2) The plan
You guys did a very complete plan. Congrats!
Two things I missed, though, were: doing analysis of other educational systems -and- search for visual references about the Medical world (semantics panel). Overally, that's a very concise plan.
Hi Joao! Thanks for your evaluation. About the personas, we wanted to do one persona per potential user (we have with 2 student personas).
About the plan: Agree with your comments. Along with qualitative and quantitative research, we need to look for other successful cases and visual references.
Thanks for your comment!
Thinking about Eugenia's question:
I guess there should be limits; but besides being really open to now being tied to your audience's stereotypes, it is important to take Personas' examples from real life research and narrow it to three points, where the ends should be the ultimate cases (like in gaming, where experts and beginners should be able to have fun, etc) and the reasons of that placing should be explained really well. In that Objectified film (http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/) you hear Dan Formosa say "the middle takes care of itself". After that, maybe the length of the description is about how much time the designer has for studying those Personas, and if there are big chances the team members chance (i.e. big projects), as the documentation must be easy to other designers understand and pick up to continue from that point on.
I agree with that, in this case we didn't make user research, so Joao's description was the information that we had.
And yes!!! I saw some really good designers concentrate on "extreme" users (the very beginner and the expert).
Very nice contributions from you guys! That's correct, indeed.