I’ve spent a while now researching college students, looking at the things they struggle with like eating right, sleeping right, getting exercise and stress. My next step was to build a couple user personas of the type of user or in this case, college student who would use my app and what they’re frustrations and motivations would be.
Researching User Personas
I did personas before for IXD301 and we had a look at them in week 3 of this module so I had a decent idea for how to produce them but it had been months so I wanted to refresh my memory and perhaps learn some new things about user personas so I did some research.
Here’s some of what I looked at…
- User Personas: What Are They and Why They Matter – Wix Creative
- How to create a user persona in 4 steps – hotjar
- Putting Persona to Work in Ux Design – Xd Ideas
- Personas – Interaction Design Foundation
- Personas – usability.gov
- Guide to Creating User Personas – ux planet
- How to Create a User Persona – 99designs
- 5 User Persona Examples to Help You Create Your Own – UserGuiding
I also went on dribbble and pinterest to get a feel for the layout of them.
Research For User Personas
Now based on the research I did looking at college student health statistics, my primary focus is on student that have to do exams which meant that I wouldn’t really be building the right persona if I just got Art and Design Students to fill out a questionnare. So instead I tried to look outside my bubble and see what life is like as a student that has to study for exams and such. For this I thought I would look around all the places my generation tend to dwell online. I realised generally from personal experience that people love expressing there feeling and opinions on the likes of Reddit, Twitter and you may or may not be surprised by this one… Tik Tok. Yeah, you see I’m not on the side of tik tok with all the rich kids doing the most low effort dances and getting millions of view and likes, I’m on alt tik tok where people love to complain about things, cancel celebrities for literally anything at this point, tell anecdotes, talk about their feelings and most importantly health and wellbeing . (Don’t get me wrong though there are some brilliant gems of content on there and it’s a great place to go if your ever bored or just wanna waste some time) I also found it way easier to look for testimonies and get research done using tik tok as it’s were I go to wind down so it was very chill stress free research. Any hoo after find a variety of different testimonies and anecdotes about the place. I started to identify two key types of person and you will see those types in my final personas.
My User Personas
It took me a while to get the right pictures for each persona from Un splash because I had built a visual of these semi-imaginary users in my head and I wanted something reflective of that. I ended up making quite the expansive folder of faces though that I can draw from in future projects which is good. I also tried things like This Person Does Not Exist but they weren’t a very young and attractive looking group of made up people and also they looked like they were all stuck in 2006 or something. I found ones I liked on Unsplash so all is well.
Anyway, here are my personas…
