User Research
The research includes several different components:
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Interviewed, observed our potential users, and synthesized our findings
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Created provisional and polished personas
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Created a user journey map for our users
These research methods allowed us to understand our users, empathize with them, and identify a design problem.
Interview
As the first step, we conducted semi-structured interviews with some students and faculty of UW as our primary users. This application could help them find empty places on campus to study or work. We conducted with four participants: two UW students and 2 workers of UW and asked them about various aspects.
The research helped us better understand our users and helped us begin defining a problem we wanted to design for.
Personas
Based on our research and synthesized our ideas, we have created two archetypal representations of our users. We have first briefly decided the basic aspects such as the goals, pains, desires, and tach use with the bio of the user. Then we sketched out the draft of the personas and polished the personas for us to better understand our users and to focus our project on their specific attributes.
User Journey Map
We used one of our personas: Claire to create the user journey map to detail her emotions, experience, and thoughts throughout her process of finding a workplace outside her home. This journey map is based on both our user interview and assumption, it helped us identify the user's feelings that we could better design for.
