Tuesday

Consolidating Interview Results

Take out your interview notes from yesterday. Write down any new thoughts or ideas that may have come to mind since last looking at these. Then, use the reflection questions below to start analyzing your results.

Reflection questions

• What thoughts and ideas are shared by several of our interview subjects?
• Are there common behaviors? Goals?
• Are certain tools used a lot or not at all or maybe used for something they weren't intended for?

Creating archetypes

Now that you have identified patterns, you can create archetypes of the different kinds of people that you are trying to solve a problem for. We call those archetypes personas.

How to create archetypes: First, you'll need to review your interview notes. Take a highlighter and mark any behaviors, needs, or challenges that you heard. Now, review your notes again, only this time you're going to look for patterns. Is there anything that's true for all or most of your interviewees? Write those patterns down in simple sentences, like "likes to be highly in control of their travel experience" or "easily flustered by crowds and lines." Each of these is a persona.

Primary design target

Choose one persona as your primary design target so that you have a really clear focus moving forward. Write this in your notes.

Develop your primary target

Now that you have selected one persona as your primary design target, we’d like to get more specific about this user. It is helpful to make your personas seem and feel like real people, with distinct personalities and lives because this helps us put ourselves in the shoes of the people we're designing a solution for and ultimately helps us create better products and services for them.

To get started, write on the User-Persona Worksheet in this lesson or click the button below, and take notes on your notebook.

1. Use the patterns you identified from your interviews as your starting point to fill out the worksheet.
2. Use your imagination to fill in the rest of the details of the worksheet, creating a user-persona that sounds like a real person. Remember, the user-persona should capture the patterns you saw across your interviews—it’s a mash-up. It should NOT represent a single person.