I thought for sure after day 1 of the CooperU UX Boot Camp I would get a good night sleep, but alas, I was awake at 3:30am, and unable to fall back to sleep.
So by the time I arrived at Cooper Headquarters this morning I had already been up for 5 hours, listened to a podcast interview with Alan Cooper, finished a blog post for Radius Church, did my daily reading, showered, and ate a big breakfast.
Day 2 was focused on personas and scenarios. We first had to finish synthesizing the user interview data we collected yesterday. It was a difficult task to get everyone’s information up on the whiteboard and then try to group the data in meaningful ways. Admittedly, I stood back during this part and observed more than I participated. The room got a bit claustrophobic with everyone trying to move sticky notes around and accomplish our goal. With so many people so close together trying to assert their opinions, I found it difficult to focus on any one thing so I hung back and tried to take in what information I could.
What I observed was the difficulty in trying to categorize and sub categorize the data. But, with enough effort and discussion it can be done. Normally, this would be done by a much smaller team of people, maybe 2-3 instead of 20.
Once we had everything up on the board, and grouped, we began talking about goals. Things got really interesting. We discussed all kinds of user goals from very specific to very broad. We tried to figure out how the goals were related and what they said about potential personas. There was a lot of debate as to whether we should have one or multiple personas. Ultimately, we landed on two personas and then discussed which was primary and which was secondary.
Again, all this would probably be done in a more efficient way if we had fewer opinions in the room. But, it was educational none the less, and hearing multiple perspectives shed light on things I know I would have never thought of on my own or in a small group.
Side note, if you are ever in San Fransisco, try Sushiritto. It’s delicious.
Once we had our two personas vetted out (Sandra and Patrick) and decided that Sandra was our primary persona, then we started talking about scenarios.
I don’t have much experience with scenarios so I was most interested to see how we would create scenarios using our personas. Since this is essentially story writing, I am pretty excited about it, and trying to tie in the goals and motivations of the persona is going to be an interesting challenge.
We ended the day by selecting the group we would work with for the rest of the week.
Tomorrow, we will write scenarios and start talking about design. I’m excited to work with my two teammates and see what all we come up with over the next two days.
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