Week 3: Who are our users?

UXD720

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In this post, I discuss creating user personas to understand my target users and the importance of competitive analysis.

User personas

The tricky thing about designing for your users is that designers and stakeholders tend to assume what the user wants. The key lesson to remember is you are not your user. It is easy to assume what you think is suitable for the product; however, the end product could fail if you base your design on these assumptions.

User personas are a detailed representation of target users that will use the product or service (Adlin and Pruitt 2010: 5). The persona is based on research that reveals the users' needs, motivations, behaviours and goals. The aim is to create a user presence in the design process so that they are the primary focus (Johansson and Messeter 2005: 231).

This week’s content has led me to rediscover the design thinking process, empathising with your users. Empathy is “our ability to see the world through other people’s eyes, to see what they feel, and experience things as they do” (Dam and Siang 2021). It may be unrealistic to step inside the user’s shoes, but we can try to understand and relate to their feelings and thoughts. Empathise is an important stage in the process because it helps you know your target audience to build a product or service that they want and need.

In this week’s activity, I have collated the user research and created a persona for my brief. Based on my findings, I discovered I had two types of personas for my concept. The first was people looking to monitor their heart rate (HR), and the second was people with high or low HR. I struggled to find users with a low/high HR, and I will be focusing on the first persona due to time limitations.

Figure 1: This is the initial persona I have created, which included some demographics, skill level of mobile apps, a brief user story and the needs and goals.

The tutors discussed the persona aesthetics and readability in the weekly study session and webinars, and this involved only including relevant details in the persona and removing unimportant information. Using a stock photo was not recommended as it can portray an unrealistic image of the target audience. I also created my design from scratch as templates are not advised as they are not tailored to my persona’s needs (Anderson 2022; Miklaszewicz 2019).

The course tutor advised me to focus on why my persona wants to meet their goals and motivations. She also suggested giving more context to the users’ behaviours. I decided to go back to my users and conduct a second interview and ask ‘why’ questions and the reasons for their wants and needs. I also removed the demographics and focused on the overall behaviours and motivations of the users.

This led the users to go deeper with their answers that revealed insightful motivations. One of the users said, “I think I have seen a lot of people my age get ill, and I want to be on top of it before it happens to me.”

I decided to move away from demographics because I wanted to avoid designing a product that is ageist. The product is aimed at people who care about their health. However, older adults (35 +) tend to acknowledge their health more as they become older. As we grow older, our health starts to decline, which causes us to become less functional. By making dietary changes and self-monitoring our health, we can improve our lifestyle and hopefully live longer.

The product will be designed for users interested in self-monitoring and improving health who don’t have a smartwatch to measure their heart rate.

Figure 2: I have re-designed an improved version of my persona based on the feedback and research.

Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis is used to understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors to design a better product (Rosenzweig 2015: 46). It analyses what other companies are doing and identifies the market gaps that have yet to be discovered.

Conducting competitor analysis methods has given me insight into the possibilities and ideas for my prototype. I have used the pluses and deltas method to analyse nutrition and health-related applications. This shows a breakdown of each app's positive and negative features and elements.

Figure 3: Pluses and deltas competitor analysis

Based on my research, I discovered that the existing app, Nutricoach, had many features that solve the personas' goals and needs. Due to this finding, I will be reviewing Nutricoach mobile application and developing it further. Some of my ideas include:

• Building a heart rate system to measure the users' heart health

• Improving accessibility

• Implementing stress management and reflection features to monitor the users’ wellbeing and mood

• Gamification features such as a rewards scheme

Reflection

Reflecting on this week, I have learnt it is crucial to ask the right questions to know the users. Asking ‘why’ can reveal insights that help form ideas and solutions to the product. Including demographics in some circumstances can portray a group of people incorrectly (Anderson 2022). Therefore, it is more important to focus on needs, motivations and behaviour.

If I could do things differently, I would like to interview more users. The more insights obtained, the more patterns and trends to discover. Furthermore, I could find users with a high/low HR. This will reveal what people do when they have a health condition and the obstacles they face when improving their health. However, I was hesitant to choose this option as some people may be vulnerable, which can affect the project's ethics.

References

ADLIN, Tamara and John PRUITT. 2010. The Essential Persona Lifecycle. Morgan Kaufmann.

ANDERSON, Nikki. 2022. ‘A 5 Step Framework for Building Better Personas’. Dscout [online]. Available at: https://dscout.com/people-nerds/designing-better-personas [accessed 15 Feb 2022].

DAM, Rikke Friis and Teo Yu SIANG. 2021. ‘Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy’. Interaction Design Foundation [online]. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy [accessed 11 Feb 2022].

JOHANSSON, Martin and Jörn MESSETER. 2005. ‘Presenting the User: Constructing the Persona’. Digital Creativity 16(4), 231–43.

MIKLASZEWICZ, Marta. 2019. ‘Why We Should Give up Adding Pictures to Personas — the Case, When Empathising Goes Wrong’. UX Collective [online]. Available at: https://uxdesign.cc/why-we-should-give-up-adding-pictures-to-personas-the-case-when-empathising-goes-wrong-6c0c8c50fce0 [accessed 24 Feb 2022].

ROSENZWEIG, Elizabeth. 2015. Successful User Experience : Strategies and Roadmaps. Edited by Todd Green. Morgan Kaufmann.