Month: July 2020

How do you design without bias? How do you design without creating a product based on your own concepts and interest? You design without projection by using user personas. Designers use personas to “avoid projection, create empathy, and focus on the few rather than the many (Wick, 2017)” when designing a product.  Some may define personas as archetypes that characterize the need, goals, technical experience, accessibility requirements, and other personal characteristics of a larger group of people (Lilley et al, 2012).  When I started my E-learning course, based on the feedback I would receive for my peers and instructor, I wondered if my designs where based on my interpretation of design concepts rather than the end user.  I now understand personas are used to incorporate focus and empathy and basically provide a prototype of fictitious users to keep all parties involved on the same page. (Nodder, 2016) (Wick, 2017) As Lilley et al (2012) states personas “…  provides a richer account of learners and makes it much easier for designers and developers to keep the learners in mind when they are working.”

Designing my personas this week, I now understand the importance of having background and demographic information.  I developed both of my personas based on “Ad-hoc (Lilley et all, 2012)” personas or as Nodder (2016) calls it “assumption” personas.  This allowed me to create these personas based on my perceptions because I did not have acceptable data, however it was a starting point.  The next step, if this was in real-time, I would need to used “data gathering questions, learning platform data, and demographics (Baumann, 2018) or online surveys and interviews as mentioned in (Lilley et al, 2012).  Overall, the use of personas is a great tool to use when developing products such as training learning objects as “…persona helps shift the e-Learning design process away from what will best suit the business to a more learner-centered approach and what will best fit the learner (Gutierrez, 2013).

Baumann, B. (2018, March 29).  User-Centered Design Through Learner Personas. Training Industry. https://trainingindustry.com/articles/content- development/user-centered-design-through-learner-personas/

Gutierrez, K. (2013, July 04). The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Creating Learner Personas. SHIFT eLearning. https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/bid/302513/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-for-Creating-Learner-Personas

Lilley, M., Pyper, A., & Attwood, S. (2012). Understanding the Student Experience through the Use of Personas. ITALICS: Innovations in Teaching & Learning in Information & Computer Sciences, 11(1), 4–13. https://doi-org.saintleo.idm.oclc.org/10.11120/ital.2012.11010004

Nodder, C. (2016, September 22). UX Design: 3 Creating Personas. LinkedIn Learning.  https://www.lynda.com/User-Experience-tutorials/UX-Design-Techniques-Creating-Personas/490663-2.html?srchtrk=index%3a5%0alinktypeid%3a2%0aq%3abuilding+personas%0apage%3a1%0as%3arelevance%0asa%3atrue%0aproducttypeid%3a2

Wick, A. (2017, March 4).  Agile Product Owner Role: Techniques. LinkedIn Learning. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/agile-product-owner-role-techniques/personas

Visual design in in our everyday life.  We see visual design in adverting and social media, education, and fashion. When we as consumers, are triggered to buy a new brand of shampoo solely because of the bottle’s aesthetics instead of the formula’s ingredients we must understand that it is all by design.  That is visual design.   Visual design is compromise of three foundational components: 1) Elements of design, 2) Principles of design, and 3) Laws of Gestalt theory. (Hagen and Golombisky, 2013).  These design tools are strategic to elicit a feeling or emotion that produces behaviors to buy or in education, an emotion to create connections for learning.

Visual design uses theories, elements, and principles to strategically produce the visual cues to have an emotional effect.  Using specific colors, placements, and theories such as Gestalt law of proximity to create movement of the eyes which triggers the brain to make specific interpretations, associations and evokes emotion to solidify the connection. Norman (2004) makes the point of colors such as red and the idea of symmetry is at the visceral level of emotion which in design is related to Attractiveness. Design principles and elements provoke visceral connection base on the attractiveness of the images, or product.  Norman (2004) later makes the distinction of behavior and reflective levels of emotion as usability and meta-cognition in his theory of emotional design. Visual design is tools to foster to all three levels of emotion as “emotion prepares us for action (Norman. 2004)”.

Overall, visual design revolves around using visual cues to create synaptic connections through cognition to trigger emotions and behavior.  It incorporates these external factors i.e. visual cues and internal factor i.e. mental cognition to produce a desired behavior and emotion.    This desired behavior or emotion can trigger you to purchase items, wear your hair in a certain style or behavior can look like engagement in learning environments i.e. “usability or functionality (Norman. 2004)”. 

References

Dirksen, J. (2016). Design for how people learn. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, Pearson.

Hagen, R.  & Golombisky, K. (2013).  White space is not your enemy. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, Taylor & Francis Group.

Norman, D. 2004 (Speaker). Emotional design: The Principles [Audio podcast]. Presentation made at the 2004 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail69.html