This document provides an overview of human-centered design principles and techniques for understanding users and their needs. It discusses conducting user research through methods like observation, interviews and personas. Personas involve creating profiles of representative users to develop empathy and keep the focus on the user. The document also discusses how to create user stories and maps based on personas to guide design. The goal is to apply a deep understanding of users to build successful products and services.

2. William Hudson
• Consultant, teacher, writer, designer
• > 40 years experience in the development
of interactive systems
• > 30 articles and papers

5. “The simplest and the most obvious way of creatinga
good product or service is to create something, that
you need yourself. This will allow you to create
something you perfectly understand and you will have a
clear idea if that is smth valuable from the beginning.”
37signals

7. Deep understanding of user’s needs
is crucial for building a successful service

8. User Human-Centred Design
• Direct engagement with people
• Understanding of contexts of use (empathy)
• Understanding of goals and tasks

9. Research
• User observation
• User Research
• Industry
• Сompetitors
• Additional needfinding strategies

10. User Observation
• What do people do now?
• What values and goals do people have?
• Types of context
• The importance of being curios

11. Choosing Participants
• Representative of target users
• May be current users of a similar system

13. User Research
• Qualitative
o Representative of target users (8-10)
o Ethnographic
• Quantitative
o Large number of respondents
o Questionnaire

14. Approximate better that nothing (may not
be ideal, but better that nothing)

15. Affinity Diagram
• A business tool used to organize ideas and data
• Process:
o Record each idea on cards or notes
o Look for ideas that seem to be related
o Sort cards into groups until all cards have been
used

21. Personas
• Personas provide empathy
• Strong psychological evidence for personal bias (Our
brains are wired to empathize with individuals rather
than groups)

22. Without Personas
• Low empathy
• Technology focus
• Featuritis
• Time scales
• Narrow scope
• Ignorance/bliss

23. Persona
• Name, age, demographic details
• Photo
• Primary goals, motivations and begaviours
• Related pain points
• Give the persona story to tell

28. Primary & Secondary Personas
• Primary personas represent behaviours that define
your product or service (customer checking in)
• Secondary personas have relatively minor differences
in goals, motivation or behaviour (manager)

29. Personas Summary
• A persona is the face of a user community
• These are used for
o Recruitment (research and usability testing)
o Sales and marketing
• Use case and user story
• Merchandising

30. Use Cases and User Stories

31. User Stories vs Persona Stories
• Before
o “As a customer I want to see a list of available
flights to make a booking”
• After
o “Bob views available flights to make a booking”

32. The main difference is that personas
describe researched (not fabricated)
behaviours

33. Persona-weighted feature matrix
Persona 1
Weight=50
Persona 2
Weight=30
Persona 3
Weight=20
Weighted
Priority
Feature 1 2 2 -1 140
Feature 2 2 1 1 150
Feature 3 0 2 2 100
Weight = 1 to 5 or % that add up to 100%
Score =
● -1 hurts the persona
● 0 persona doesn’t care either way
● +1 helpful to the persona
● +2 persona LOVES this feature! It’s a must-have!

37. Design Map
• Who
o Personas
o Persona‐weighted feature matrix
• What
o Use Cases
o Persona Stories
• How
o Customer Journey (Design Map)
o Wireframes, Sketch

43. Be creative and have fun!

44. Books
• Alan Cooper (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
• Don Norman (2009). Design of everyday things
• Tim Brown (IDEO, 2012). Change by Design
• Goodwin, K. (2009). Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human‐
Centered Products and Services, John Wiley & Sons
• Hudson, W. (2013). “User Stories Don’t Help Users: Introducing Persona
Stories” in Interactions Magazine, Nov‐Dec 2013, ACM.
www.personastories.com