Week 11 — Research For/By Design — Part 3— User Personas
Introduction
Hello! For this week’s assignment, I was tasked along with my team members to create user personas and develop at least one to three design ideas to base our design solutions on.
Here’s how we split the personas into these categories:
- age and lifestyle
- education level
- interests and values
- goals and desires
- limitations
- patterns of behavior
Primary User Persona
We chose our primary persona to be based on the general public stakeholders by selecting a user who is a resident of New York City and has familiar experiences with NYC’s public transit system. We considered Liam to be the ideal primary persona as he would be directly impacted based on NYC’s issues with public transportation. Some of the highlights that he has brought upon the subject are that he would like to see improvements of getting alerts when a crime activity has occurred and an introduction of an incentivize program that gives users some more benefits/rewards while using the transit services.
Secondary User Persona
For our secondary user persona, we chose Lian as she was considered as a hybrid-mix between a tourist and a metropolitan resident of New York City. As her profile mentions that she lives in San Francisco, CA, she makes occasional trips to NYC as her company is headquartered in NYC which makes her an ideal candidate for someone who would not be as directly influenced by NYC’s main issues with public transportation, but as a key individual to have some external insights about the matter. Some of the highlights that she has mentioned were public safety concerns and implementing an easy navigation system to NYC’s public transit system.
Proposed Design Ideas/Mockups
Here are the design ideas that my team members and I have brainstormed and developed by observing both of our user personas:
- Increase ridership safety
- Implementing an incentivize program
- Integrating a navigation system
- Adding the LED status boards as an additional functionality
Self-Reflection Time!
Overall, this exercise definitely helped a lot to form design solutions based on viewing user personas and their insights upon the main issue. Having to do primary/secondary research beforehand has helped me realize the multitudes of relevant topics that surround with public transportation and made it easier for us to form user personas based on the research.
My team members and I ultimately decided to go with either design idea #1 or #2 as we all felt like those ideas would incorporate both of our primary and secondary user personas. The main goal was to improve the ridership experience for all users and these two design ideas have made it suitable to achieve the goal in a simplistic, yet direct way.
I have learned so much about the challenges that New York City is currently facing with public transportation and it surprises me that there are so many improvements left to be implemented into the services and system. As a suburban resident who does not typically rely on a public transit system to get to one destination to another, it was very interesting to view the issue in others’ perspectives based on the user personas that have been created.
