Personas

• it is important to research the user in relation to tasks

User characterization

Usage Frequency

This is for a software that is already ready to use.

Three categories of users:

• primary: frequent hands-on
• secondary: occasional or via someone else
• tertiary: affected by its introduction, influence some decisions

Intrinsic characteristics

• age, gender
• language, culture
• education (reading and math skills)
• physical limits or handicap

Relation to technology and application domain

• computer experience
• experience in the field
• experience with the application
• motivation, attitude
• emotional reaction

Personas

• Instead of population as a whole, refine into groups of users, eventually define different "typical" users
• A persona is a fictitious character used as a specific representative of a user class

Advantages

• convenient handle for talking about user classes
• focuses on typical user, rather than extreme
• discourages the common design error of describing what your ideal users should be, rather than what they actually are
• encourages empathy

Disadvantages

• may be misleading
• stereotype trap

Environments

• Task-Based Model will take the environment into account as an aspect that could impact user productivity

Environment Characterization

• Physical location
  • Where is the user located?
• Body Position
  • How is the user positioned?
• Surroundings
  • cleanliness
  • danger
  • privacy
  • level of distraction
  • noise level
• Access to help
  • access to family members
  • community
  • isolation

Goals and tasks

A goal is what we want to achieve or the state we want to reach, without it being in terms of operations linked to a computer tool.

A task is a specific step in connection with achieve a goal.

Tasks and subtasks

The idea that a task can also have sub-tasks. Each goal has tasks and those tasks could have sub-tasks.

For example: When ordering food and making a payment, you can have a subtask of inputting payment info and entering address as a subtask

You can also reuse subtasks if they are similar between two tasks. Looking for common tasks will help create a good ui.

A page-based design is not a task-based design

Steps to Follow

1. Determine user groups or Personas
2. Create a set of goals for each persona, as well as a typical environment in which they would try to accomplish these goals
3. For each persona/goal:
   • Create a list of all task the user needs to execute
4. Gather all tasks:
   • See if some tasks definer for different personas are actually the same
     • Merge/Reduce
5. Characterize each task:
   • Frequency of the task?
   • What are the time constraints for the task?
   • How is the task learned?
   • What can go wrong?
   • What are the preconditions to performing the task?
6. Further understand and refine each task ,and put it in relation to other tasks:
   • timeline (scenario) - Temporal relation of a task to other tasks
   • hierarchy of subtask - Subdivision of a task into sub-tasks

Common Errors

• Wrong point of view: thinking from the system's point of view
  • System: notify user about appointment
  • User: Get a notification about appointment
• Think too soon about feasibility:
  • Trade-offs between users and goals and implementation feasibility maybe inevitable, but do not yet consider them...
• Thinking too early about design vision
  • For example: system will display a reminder popup window one day ahead of an appointment (perhaps after persona analysis we realize this will not be useful)