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.