User Personas - high-level descriptions of your target audience's needs and challenges - are becoming mainstays for software product teams. But like many other requirements documentation, they can often feel flat, overly generic, and nearly useless once development has actually begun. In becoming “just another form to fill out,” your User Personas have lost connection with their original purpose: to help product teams build connection and empathy with your primary customer base, and in doing so provide the grounding basis for fast and deliberate decision making.
In this course, you'll learn to think of your Personas as living documentation both of your target audience as well as the evolving shape of your product. In your class project, you’ll be asked to create a set of personas for a health and wellness app you’re going to re-design. I'll be weaving this same design challenge through out all of my courses on the UX design process so that you can follow this redesign from user research to prototyping: not only can you take part in kicking off your own design project, but you’ll walk away with a high-quality UX artifact to use in your portfolio.
Reinject some life into your User Personas to help build empathy and engagement for your users across your product teams.
Class project summary: Create a set of (at least) 2 (but no more than 4) Personas for a health and wellness app you are planning to redesign.
There are two handouts available for you to use to get started building your Personas.
The aim of this exercise is to ensure by the end of it that you have produced a high-quality UX artifact (a set of at least 2 Personas) that you can use in your UX portfolio. By creating these artifacts through this course, you will be able to explain in detail the design thinking that went into their development.
The subject of this design challenge is to redesign your favorite (or maybe least favorite) health and wellness app - however you choose to define that. What gets under your skin? What do you think you could design better? What isn’t working?
I’ve chosen this topic of a health-wellness app redesign for several reasons:
- I’d like us to demonstrate the ways that technology can be used to improve users lives.
- Reworking the design of an app that already exists means that there is an existing user base - and hence less user research holes for us to worry about filling during your design process.
- I’ve limited the scope to health and wellness apps because constraints are a healthy. HA! :) Sometimes limiting options make the creative juices flow better.
- Lastly, I want you to choose something to really sink your teeth into. Something that you are opinionated about. Passion is the fuel that will carry you through these assignments
During this course, you’ll be guided through a step by step process of how to create these documents, using Alan Cooper's (amended) framework for building Personas. Feel free to share your work in progress and add feedback to other students’ work.
What counts as a health and wellness app? Anything that you feel could improve the health or wellbeing of your users. Think Fitbit, GoogleFit, HealthKit, Headspace, MyFitnessPal, or ... maybe even a better (less stress inducing Task app). All I ask is that you choose an app you really care about improving. The more engaged and interested you are in solving the problem the stronger your redesign work will be. Make this your own.
This application redesign is something I want you to work with deeply over the course of all my classes, so each class will be building up more of the fieldwork, artifacts and process documents to create a fully realized design sprint that you can showcase as an example of your design thinking in action. My intention is to help you build a redesign you can showcase in your UX portfolio -- with the added benefit that you're in the driver seat of what the final outcome is. You aren't limited by any of the constraints that you might be on a 'real' redesgin project (like deadlines and budgets).
And who knows, you may fall so in love with your project and the app that you’ll be redesigning that you might just launch it yourself. #shipit
Where do I get the user research to inform my Personas? Ah yes, the user research. Welcome to the wonderful world of doing user research in the wild! :) I promise I will have a more indepth course offering about various tips and tricks for doing user research in the wild, but here are a few tried and true techniques to get you started:
- Check out newspaper articles describing / reviewing the app - see how the market was pitched, who are they targeting? How is it being described? Who is suppose to find it useful?
- Do you know anyone of in your network who uses the app? Any chance they would be up for getting a coffee to tell you more about their experience? Could they show you how they use it?
- Are there any user / support forums for the product? What seem to be common questions? What are some of the complaints?
- Use your own experience (being mindful not to navel-gaze too much) as a guide - you chose this product for a reason
- And as a last resort - make assumptions about your Personas - but be sure to highlight what assumptions your making to see if you can test those out through the design process
