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Schedule

Resources

Module 4 - Usability: Personas and User Flow

Readings:

• For the week, in general:
  • Universal Principles of Design (textbook):
    • Prototyping p. 158
    • Hierarchy of Needs p 106
    • Affordance p 20
    • Wayfinding p 208
    • Mental Model p. 130
    • Mapping - p. 128
    • Visibility - p. 202
• For Monday:
  • Perfecting Your Personas by Kim Goodwin
  • The Origin of Personas by Alan Cooper
  • Develop Personas from Usability.gov
    
  • skim: Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit by George Olsen
• For Tuesday:
  • Card sorting: a definitive guide by Donna Maurer and Todd Warfel
  • About Face 3 - Chapter 1 by Alan Cooper (pages 13-24 are of particular importance)
• For Thursday - Friday:
  • Designing Interfaces - Chapter 4: Organizing the Page: Layout of Page Elements by Jennifer Tidwell
  • Skim the following pattern sites with your site in mind. What do you see that can help with your user's scenario?
    • Jennifer Tidwell's Patterns - early version and book version, Designing Interfaces
    • Patterns in Interaction Design by Martijn van Welie:
      • News site
      • Home Page
      • Article Page
      • Newsletter
      • Event Calendar
      • Contact Page
    • Design of Sites by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, And Jason I. Hong
      • Homepage Portal
      • Grid Layout
      • Clear First Reads
      • Multiple Ways to Navigate
      • Browsable Content
      • Site Branding

Recommended Readings (or viewing)

• Interactions Design Magazine (a special interest group of the ACM)
• join the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)'s email discussion list
• Interfaces That Flow: Transitions as Design Elements by Jonathan Follett
• Interfaces for Staying in the Flow by Benjamin B. Bederson
• Interface Design As A Life Or Death Proposition by Doug LeMoine
• User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing by Mike Padilla
• 28 minute video from Google that talks about their approach to simplicity and user expectations. "Jen Fitzpatrick is an Engineering Director at Google. She currently manages Google's user experience team, which is responsible for the user interface design and usability analysis of Google's many products."

Web Pattern Libraries:

• Martijn van Welie's Pattern Library - close to Alexander in concept. This library provides a collection of patterns which can be applied to a problem, but would have to be combined with other patterns to achieve a full solution.
• Yahoo Design Pattern library - created during the 2006-07 redesign of yahoo. The patterns identify a problem and provide the branded solution. This might be closer to a corporate identity book or a style book.
• Design of Sites by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, And Jason I. Hong (requires free registration to access patterns). This has been released as a book and is gaining a strong following.
• Jennifer Tidwell's Patterns - early version and book version, Designing Interfaces

Lecture Notes:

• Monday - Personas and video: Steve Krug Interview
• Tuesday - Cardsorting and label list
• Wednesday - Reports on Edward Tufte and Pattern Language
• Thursday - Patterns and Style Guides
• Friday - Cardsorting Practice

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Assignment

1 -Personas are archetypes for users of the site or product. They are not market share. Market share is a bland demographic of blended information - possibly good for Hallmark, not so useful for any sort of niche market -and with the internet, most markets are niche markets. By using archetypes, you can come to understand specific needs that your users have, beyond the generic minimum requirements.

Your assignment this week is to create two personas. This should be fun. Your personas should be quirky and have character. Real people do. Your personas should NOT be based on your or even particularly relate to you. They should be two people who are reflective of the magazine's audience and should be a segment of the demographics that you have identified using the tools below.

Assignment:

• Create two personas using the Personas worksheet** (You do not have to use all of the characteristics.)
• Watch the USA Today demographics presentation and look at some of the Claritas demographics by segment or zip code. This explain common groups or demographics that are present in America today.
• Each persona should each be unique and distinct.
  • example of what NOT to do: Two people who are 30, healthy, well educated, but one is artsy and one is a geek; or one is a man and one is a woman; or one can program and one can't.
  • If you are stumped, go observe people in their natural settings: Weaver Street Market, South Point Mall, A small local cafe in Sanford.
• Each persona should represent a significant user of your chosen web site.
  • One should be a major user
  • One would be a minor user.
• Save the personas as a Microsoft Word document to be submitted at the end of the semester.

Minimum persona characteristics:

1. a name and picture
2. demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
3. job title and major responsibilities
4. goals and tasks in relation to your site
5. environment (physical, social, technological)
6. a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site
7. Scenario
   Include a scenario of a typical task that this person would want to accomplish.
   Make sure this ia a complete task, not a partial or sub-task (if they are searching, what are they searching for - be exact)

2 - User Flow diagram