On Sep.17 in studio, I sketched a rapid ideation for first time travelers arriving in BART SFO who have no/unstable connection to Internet or prefer not to rely on their smart phones.
During the process, what I found most helpful was the brainstorming. Coming up with 20 user behaviors in a short time was quite challenging. So when I went out of inspiration or ideas, I started to think about aspects more and more uncommon like "Taking v-log on her trip" or "Miss Forgetful", which surprisingly ended up in a more vivid and realistic persona. Similarly, when I brainstormed about her needs and goals, I almost had a drama running in my head picturing her adventure at SFO. Compared to post-its written earlier in the class, those created later seemed to be more solid and made more sense.
Of course as the workshop proceeded, I also found something that drew my confidence in the concept I was working on and might have resulted in a relatively unsatisfying ideation. I realized I could not validate whether the personas I created really fit the realistic scenario. By the time of the workshop, I haven't paid a visit to any BART station yet. Hence my personal experience mostly falls in the area of "traveler". I could feel that this hindered me from imagining how "Alex" would interact with possible elements in the BART station. For instance, I sketched "Fare & Schedule" info as one of the 6 key uses, which I supposed was not that accessible in the station based on my past experience with Metro stations in other countries I had been to. The truth however, is that these information are right on a sticker on the kiosks. Therefore I would have to re-think the concept of my "BART Self-help" to coordinate with the real-life scenario.
As the workshop title suggested, it is called "provisional personas" so it is expectable that these road blocks would take place. To improve the accountability of my rapid ideation and provisional personas, I'm thinking about applying these tools in the second or third stage of preliminary user research instead of the first, especially in the fields I'm not familiar with. I believe this should help create a more reliable and usable concept for future iterations.
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