Personas

Persona: Jason

Overview Jason Powers aged 8

• Younger brother who is 4
  
• Mum – financial analyst
  
• Dad – hospital

A day in the life

• School --> Home --> Tea --> Play games -->
  park to play football --> Dinner --> TV --> Bed by 9
  
• Weekends --> Football training at 9 in the morning till
  11 --> Lunch --> TV --> Goes to football with dad (big Arsenal fan)
  --> Tea from take-away --> friends come round or sometimes he goes round
  to play computer games or just chill out --> Dinner --> picked up from
  dad--> home --> TV --> bed
  
• Very outgoing person
  
• Calm and relaxed

School activities

• Dropped off at school in the mornings & picked up
  after school
  
• Breakfast at school, member of breakfast club and has
  school dinners
  
• Finds school very boring and parents feel he is not
  learning much

Household and leisure activities

• Returns from school and jumps straight onto PS2
  
• Loves counter strike and FIFA 2007
  
  
  
  • Level 15 and finished 2 seasons with Arsenal
  
  
• Much the same at weekends but sometimes has friends round.
  
• Plays football sometimes after school with friends
  
• Loves reading PS2 magazines

Goals, fears and Aspirations

• Wants to have a career in computers and gaming
  
• Afraid of next doors cat, Molly
  
• Loves computer games too much, bit of a fanatic
  
• Homework and class test

Computer skills, knowledge and
Abilities

• Can use PC and consoles
  
• Picks up different styles of gaming easily

Market size and influence

• Great influence as he is into technology such as gaming
  
• Finds new technology interesting

Demographic attributes

• Quite wealthy
  
• Live in a very quite area.
  
• Shops and park easily accessible

Technology

• Mainly used for gaming
  
• Fascinated by new inventions such as PSP and
  PS3

• Loves to keep up with new and old technology
  
• Has played on Sega mega drive and has the PS collection,
  he only needs the PS3 to complete his collection
  

Communicating

• Plays football with a couple of mates from school and from
  his street
  
• They get together and have tournaments in FIFA 2007 and
  did so with a Mortal Kombat tournament
  
• Has joined swimming club in town
  
• Loves going to computer fairs
  
• Was taken to a Virtual reality chamber for his birthday
  which he found very cool

International considerations

• Last years trip to Egypt was a complete disaster, as he
  moaned all the time he was there
  
  
  
  • But fine when he went to Japan the year before, because
    he was shown all sorts of new technology and that is where he brought his
    PSP

HCI Theory & Practice - Personas

Definition of a Persona: "A persona is a rich picture of an imaginary person who represents your core user group"
(Beale et al, 2004, Human-Computer Interaction 3rd Edition)

Where possible, we will try to involve many real life users into the design process as possible as well as using persona's. When formulating a design solution from assessing the persona's and real life users, as a group we can ask, "How will X react to this?". By asking these types of questions, we can then begin to imagine how the end user will interact and behave, which will inevitably aid in the decision to choose the prospective idea.

Todays Meeting

After today’s meeting we have decided to create the personas to evaluate the ideas that are left after stage two.

We have decided that 2 real life and 2 fictional persona's will be documented, this ensures there is a even balance. Furthermore, there we are assuming all the persons attend the same school in Harbourne, Birmingham.

We will be following the Microsoft personas template in the creation of the personas, although one will be a real life user.

The following are benefits of developing personas part of the design process defined by Tina Calabria

• Users' goals and needs become a common point of focus for the project, hence following the user centered design process.
  


• The group can develop personas relatively quickly to gather user requirements
  


• Design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas


• Disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas


• Designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, reducing the frequency of large and expensive usability tests


• One of the personas will be a real life user in order to gain real knowledge from a real potential user

Once the personas have been documented we will create scenarios in which we observe how the personas would interact with the purposed technology.

By doing this, we will have a better indication on how we should design the technology during the creative design and prototyping sections.

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