Exercise 2 - Personas and Scenarios - Conclusion and Analysis

Reasoning behind persona 1, Busra.

When we created our first persona, Busra, we thought of the typical young travelling person who is genuinely interested in Sweden or specifically Stockholm. We believe that a lot of tourists come to Stockholm because of its flourishing culture and Busra represents this group. In contrast to our second persona, she also speaks good English, so understanding instructions in English should not be a problem.

Scenarios of Busra

Our belief is that the behaviour of young and active people like Busra is that they go by metro a lot more than other groups. That was the motivation for making Busra want to buy an unlimited travelling ticket for a week. We also envisioned a situation where Busra already had gotten an SL card from her Swedish friend. It’s not unlikely for young travelling people to have many international friends. Eventually she ended up failing to buy the desired ticket in both scenarios because of the limited usability of the machines.

The most important pain points for Busra was: “Clear instructions on how to get access card”, “Clear overview over the tickets and prices” and “Recommended ticket types”. The current ticket machine failed more or less on all of these points.

The reasoning around the creation of Hans Zimmerman was that we wanted a person who would represent a majority of our target group. Some research confirmed that older couples especially from Germany is frequent visitors to Stockholm. Furthermore most of these people do not speak very good english, which also helps our case to simulate the language barrier when tourists operate our ticket system.

The two scenarios were constructed in a way so that we captured two obvious problems that we knew from our prestudy was a problem for tourists. There is however a risk when creating and expanding these scenarios since the “problems” that we come up with is still biased from our own experiences. The steps that we assume would be a problem for tourists might be exaggerated or underestimated, that is why it important to create a thorough field-study to base these on.  

Exercise 2 - Personas and scenarios - All members

Persona 1: Busra Mirzaie

Background

Busra Mirzaie is a 26 year old student currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in English literature. She is visiting Sweden for the first time and is traveling alone.

Personality

Busra is always eager to learn from different cultures and has done research at home before starting her journey. She has travelled before, and likes to do it alone. Except from the sightseeing opportunities, Busra is interested of the Swedish cuisine and history, and wants to spend some time in the Old Town of Stockholm in order to experience authentic Swedish food crafting procedures. She spends her free time gardening and taking care of her younger cousins. She also enjoys cooking, reading and  is an active participant in the Mountain Climbing Society of Istanbul.

Today

When arriving at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, she took the Arlanda Express to the central of Stockholm. Her hotel, Hilton Hotel, is located near the subway station Slussen. To get there, she plans to take the subway, just like recommended by the hotel. Right now, she wants to reach her hotel to get some rest and unpack her bags. Although she is travelling lightly, there are some things Busra doesn’t want to leave at the hotel, so she makes sure she will bring her camera, wallet and mobile phone with her all times. After unpacking her items, Busra is planning to walk around the Old Town for the remainder of the day and then, starting the next day, visit different parts of the Old Town to get to know the typical Swedish food producers.

Goal

Getting to the hotel located near the station “Slussen”.

Scenarios

Scenario 1

At the Central station in Stockholm, figuring how to buy a ticket from the ticket machine for her one week stay, and how much she has to pay.

Flow of events 1

Busra arrives at the Central Station around 9 am, GMT+1. She wants to know how to purchase a ticket and needs to find the location of the ticket machine. She will then use her credit card and buy a one week ticket so she could travel without worrying about her ticket expiring. Busra has done some research while at home on the subway system of Stockholm, so she is reasonably familiar with the ticket machine interface. Busra does not speak Swedish very well, so she will use the machine’s English translation ability. When she finally reaches the ticket machine after several frustrating minutes of searching, she starts to look for instructions on how to purchase a ticket. She examines the large boards surrounding the display and is appalled by the amount of text that is displayed on the stickers. There are instructions on many areas, including prices, maps and ticket durations, all over the boards and with different text fonts. There are also a large map on top of the machine with different color schemes, and to add insult to injury, there are large, blue stickers with numbers on them that confuses her - the stickers themselves are obvious to find but the instructions behind them not so much. She also notices that the English translations is sometimes below the Swedish text, and sometimes besides it. She figures it’d probably be easier to just stand in line and talk with the ticket booth personnel. The following pictures illustrates some of her concerns.

Senario 2

When she is about to give up, she remembers that her classmate had given her a blue card to use for traveling in the subway. Now she wants to purchase a ticket.

Flow of events 2

She spots the english flag in the bottom left corner and presses it to change language. The text “Hold your card against the blue card reader” appears and she follows the instructions. She can then choose between different ticket options such as “ “ and “ “. She is now confused about which ticket that will be more economically efficient for her stay in Stockholm. She looks for a button where she can get an overview of the different ticket types and prices but can't find it and turns around to get more information about the ticket types in the information booth.

Scenario 3

At the train station “Slussen” trying to figure out what type of ticket she is going to buyher

Flow of events 3

Busra walks out of the hotel and grabs a brochure. She reads it and figures she has to take the subway as the quickest way to the Old Town. She walks to the subway station Slussen and goes to the machine in order to plan the trip. In particular, she wants to use the map, and tries to understand the different color schemes and the different zones the map is partitioned into. She then holds her ticket and passes through the turnstile.

Persona 2: Hans Zimmermann

Background

Hans is a 65 year old man from Germany that grew up in a farm town called Bergheim, about an hour’s drive outside Köln. Hans composed music for cheap german soap operas during the bigger portion of his working life. He is happily married to his wife and they both enjoy traveling together. They are both retired today and since their last child moved out they now have a lot of spare time, that they partly will use to visit other countries.

Personality

Hans is an absent minded person that often forgets where he puts stuff. He is social by nature and love to meet new people with different cultures. Since he haven’t got a “real” education his english is not the best, what he know is what he has learned from other visits. He lives by the motto: Help the people in need and expect nothing in return.

Today

Hans and his wife is here in Sweden for three weeks. They plan to spend their first week here in the Stockholm where there is a lot to see, specially with his and his wife’s love for culture. During their stay here in the capital of Sweden they use tourist guides to make the most out of their visit. They plan to walk a lot and occasionally travel with the metro. So far they feel like the swedes are very sweet and helpful, which they find lovely.

Scenario 1

Case:

At T-Centralen trying to buy single tickets in order to get to Slussen.

Goal:

Want to visit Fotografiska museet which is close to Slussen.

Flow of events:

It is wednesday morning and Hans and his Wife has for the first time arrived to T-centralen since yesterday's arrival in Stockholm. They want to get tickets soon so they don’t get stuck at this very stressful place with people walking in fast paces everywhere. After quite some time looking for ticket machines, they finally find one. The information is not available in German so  they press the english button. The information is quite complicated and it not clear how to proceed, the only two buttons is “info” or “Svenska”. They turn around in frustration and see a guard and asks him, he points them in the direction of the ticket booth. They see the queue and ten minutes later they have their tickets and walk past the turnstile and down to their subway.

Scenario 2

Case:

At slussen, the queue to the ticket booth at the gates is long, so Hans decides to take another shot at buying from the machine.

Goal:

Get home to their hotel near Odenplan.

Flow of events:

Hans approaches the machine and this time after pressing the English translation button Hans finally realized that he is supposed to press the blue text that says “press here” embedded in the middle of the text in order to get to the single ticket menu. Hans is now confused by the many options that appears. He is only sure about not needing the Arlanda ticket, but he does not know which one of the other options he should choose. Since there is no explanation of what UL or County border means he decides to try the zone ticket. Now a new variation of options appear and he considers what the different letters A, AB, ABC means and also what impact the RED and FULL has on each ticket. Maybe the RED symbolizes the red line but where is the tickets for the blue or green line? The queue of stressed people are lining up behind and he feels bad in taking up more time by trying to understand the system. He turns away to find the ticket booth for help.

This is our table with Pain points, that is on a scale of 1 to 5 how important is the following properties for our personas, where 1 is very important and 5 not at all.

Function	Primary Persona - Busra Mirzaei	Secondary Persona - Hans Zimmermann
Clear instructions on how to get access card	1	5
Choose between paper ticket and loading access card	5	1
Clear overview over the tickets and prices	1	1
Easy to understand the zone system	4	2
Comprehension of reduced and regular ticket types	3	2
Clear instructions on optional ways to buy ticket	2	3
Clear and alternative language options	5	1
Recommended ticket types	1	1

Exercise 3 - Individual Post - Viktor Bram

During the past week we have used our data gathering from our interviews to create personas and scenarios. To do so we looked for recurring patterns and tried to form cultural probes and reflect regular behavior among our tourists. It was very important for us that our two personas really reflected the tourists. I think we succeeded to to do which is very good. From our personas we then created two scenarios for each persona. We based these scenarios from the problems we found out that our tourists often had. Then we made a table where we listed several possible things that could make it easier for a tourist in general when buying tickets and applied it on our two tourist. We ranked how much they needed the things from 1 to 5 and could then see that the most important for both our tourist is to get a recommended ticket and a nice layout for all tickets and prices. One idea could be that the tickets get listed and the recommended one is highlighted.

No we’re looking forward into our future process of the project. Next to come is to make a paper prototype for our product. This stage will most likely have several cycles of prototyping and will go from a conceptual design into a more concrete design. It’s important to encourage reflection and to get input from all the group members so our final result is as good as possible and the usability is as we want it to be. During the product development we will in the beginning create a more low-fidelity prototype which will develop into a high-fidelity prototype over time. Before we can present a mockup it is important that we have used a participatory design so that we think that our product does just not satisfies tourists but also the regular swedish users, SL and personal and other possible stakeholders.

Exercise 3 - Individual post - Per

While coming up with personas and scenarios during the last exercise and the past week, I have realized that there are a lot of flaws in the ticket buying system in the metro today. The conceptual design of the user interface is not very intuitive and there is far too many options. It is clear to me that User Centered System Design (UCSD) was not applied during product development. Lack of language options was another issue that was imminent during the prestudy.

Our next step in the process is to get together for a brainstorming session and try to come up which exact part of the ticket system to focus on. Early discussions of this have suggested that we might focus our scope on the single ticket-part of the user interface since that is where we have identified most of the problems. After deciding on our scope we must establish requirements for the upcoming product and start preparing for making a prototype. I am really looking forward to entering the more creative part of the development. The cycles of prototyping will present several challenges, especially since we are a large group with a lot of strong opinions. The early sketches and paper prototypes will define the rest of the project and i hope it will turn out as simple and intuitive as i imagine it.

Exercise 3 - Individual post - Amanda

This week we have been creating two personas and written scenarios by doing informal narrative description. They have been created by thinking of the average tourist we met when doing the field study. From this we have been using establishing requirements by trying to understand the users needs and rated 1-5 (where 1 is the most requested function) the requested functions with the help of ”Pain points”. By rating different functions of the ticket machine we have been able to recognize the functional requirements that is requested by tourists and they are:

• ·      To get an overview over the different ticket types and prices to be able to compare what kind of ticket that is the most beneficial.
• ·      To easily find the requested ticket by showing the most common ones first. This to optimize the usability

After this analysis and field study, we have realized that the main problem when purchasing a ticket from the machine derive from buying paper tickets where the key problem is to understand the zone system. This is because when tourist by a ticket for a long period of time, they need an access card and when purchasing the card, the tourist also load it at once at the shop.  This causes them to not use the machines.

From this we hope to establish usability goals and experience goals that we can originate from for the rest of this project. Our next step in this process is to determinate the distribution channel and start to do some low-fidelity prototyping by for example sketching and creating storyboards.

Tomorrow it is time for exercise 3 where we will do 3 different brainstorming exercises. I am looking to comparing design ideas!

Good night

//Amanda

Exercise 3 - Individual post - Julia

The past week we turned our gathered data based on the interviews and our exploration of context into personas. These personas represented the typical tourists visiting Stockholm. The personas helped us later visualizing different scenarios (which were also part of our data) so we easily could get to the bottom of the problem by analyzing the different behaviors: What are tourists needs trying to purchase a ticket from the ticket machine and what is the best way of helping them? Luckily, this is our next step in the progress of creating an interface.

After the evaluation using the "Pain Points" we found the clearest motivations and now we are ready to establish the requirements. The tourists' user experience goals are:

1. A system that recommends the right ticket type.
2. A system that offers a clear view over different and relevant tickets.

With these goals, I think that we're also ready to make some constraints about the scope of the project. It seems that the most important ticket in this context for tourists is the paper ticket, which I think we should focus more on for the interface. The fact that a tourist that visits Sweden for the first time will have to buy an access card from the front disk makes it impossible for us to apply their purchase of tickets in our scope.

Since we have a limited amount of time and resources in this project, I think it's a great tool to use personas and scenarios in the development of our interactive design. In an other situation, we might have brought real persons into the process instead of trying to visualize our target group. Though, I think it's very important (even if you bring a person from the target group into the development), to understand the target group and their needs. It's when you start to understand the people that are going to use your design that you can develop a great design. 

Fore tomorrows exercise, I'm really excited. Finally, we're ready to start working on our prototype! I prepared a bundle of post-its so we tomorrow can start working on the conceptual design, which I hope will be a huge success. 

Exercise 3 - Individual post - Morgan

This week has been full of imagination where we have been trying to produce different personas and scenarios based on our previous gathering of data. This has been both interesting and useful to us since we really got to “put a face” on some of our target group. And by starting from a detailed persona we could identify where in the chain of events this person could face problems and why, which really helps to envision the current situation. For our German tourist for example, Hans Zimmer, it was easy to assume that some of the english terms that is used in the ticket machine is too hard or cryptic. The usability of the ticket booth is clearly an disadvantage to people with poor knowledge of english. The purpose with the ticket machines is to reduce the queues and the time it takes to receive a fare ticket and people should get motivated by this when they want to buy a ticket. This calls for a more intuitive interaction with the machine where you eliminate risks of confusion. The user experience goal should therefore be to retrieve a ticket with as little confusion and hassle as possible.

From our research, field studies and scenarios we have also come to a conclusion where we should put our focus. There is two ways you can receive your tickets from the machines, either electronically with an access-card or simply through a paper-ticket. We have agreed that the most problems arises when tourists want to buy a single ticket in paper form, since they don’t have an access-card. This due to the layout and functions in the machine. So the future work will be on how to improve this section of the machine.

The next step in the process is to take all this info that we have been gathering and establish a requirement and then turn this into a conceptual design. Brainstorming is a good way to get the ideas flowing and then gather some of the best ideas and eventually turn them into paper prototypes.