Proto-Personas

According to Gothelf (2012), one of the most significant challenges is the persistent gap between stakeholders’ ideas and consumers’ attitudes. An efficient way to keep all involved in the project to think about the client’s perspective is to create Personas.

Personas are generally the result of comprehensive user research that creates real representations of a particular target audience. Usually, it is an expensive and time-consuming process. An invaluable alternative is to develop proto-personas.

Proto-personas are simplified Personas. The main difference is that, instead of using traditional research methods, the proto-personas are born from brainstorming where the people involved use their knowledge about a specific theme and their intuition about the person that is going to use the product or service and what will motivate their use.

Proto-personas are the starting point when evaluating products, it helps to create quick hypotheses concerning the project. They are also useful to reinforce the necessity of including the point of view of the customers in the strategic planning. It is an invaluable tool to define the strategy of products and services.

After the proto-personas, the hypotheses developed in the process are usually investigated. When this investigation and user research happens, the proto-personas are rewritten. The most significant value of proto-personas is constructing them, as this exercise creates a focus on the user.

For this project, two different proto-personas will be created. One of these proto-personas will be visually impaired, therefore reinforcing that the solutions proposed will try to address issues these users face while using Deliveroo.

The proto-personas were created using the steps proposed by Gothelf (2011).

Meet the Proto-Personas

References

Gothelf, J. (May 2012)  Using Proto-Personas for Executive Alignment. UX Magazine.  Retrieved from http://uxmag.com/articles/using-proto-personas-for-executive-alignment

Gothelf, J. (November 2011) Using Personas For Executive Alignment. Jeff Gothelf. Retrieved from https://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/using-personas-for-executive-alignment/

Task Analysis

The Task Analysis (TA) emerged from the ergonomics as an empirical method that allows researchers to describe and analyse how people perform their activities.

The purpose of the TA is to describe the task with a defined goal and a series of steps to achieve that goal  (Jonassen, Tessmer, & Hannum, 1989). The ergonomics adopt the TA to understand the tasks performed in a work environment to collect information which will enable discussions about the causes and solutions for the problems found in the fulfilment of the tasks (Stanton, 2006). Quickly, it became apparent that using TA  would provide information that could aid the conception of computer systems. It is with this purpose that the HCI researchers have a considerable interest in TA.

A better comprehension of the tasks can help define the scope of the problem collecting information systematically about a particular issue, organise the data gathered, make time predictions to execute specific tasks, prevent errors (identifying difficult and/or confuse procedures), help identify the source of the problems and generate hypotheses on how to solve them (Usability.gov, n.d.).

TA is an iterative and interactive process, with alternate periods of data collection, classification and analysis. There are different methods of TA but the most common ones are the Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) and the Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), (Usability.gov, n.d.).

HTA breaks down a task from top-down to make a hierarchy of subtasks that can also be broken down successively. Figure 1 illustrates an example of HTA.

According to Greenberg (2004), TA consists of the following steps:

1. Create an inventory of tasks: discover the tasks that the user performs.

Use different techniques of data collection: the best is to observe and/or interview the real user. Try to identify the general goals and construct a list of tasks related to these goals. The goals should be generic and technology agnostic, for example in the use of ATMs “identify user” is a generic goal while “type login and password” is a specific goal described with the use of a device.

2. Select tasks to be analysed and describe them with further details: typically the selected tasks are the ones done more frequently by the user or the most critical ones.

3. Describe the tasks: break down the tasks (describing them in subtasks and procedures) and order them (defining the causes and timing of the tasks).

4. Validate the tasks described: present the TA to someone that knows the tasks well to verify its consistency.

Deliveroo Task Analysis

For this project, an assumption was made that the primary goal of Deliveroo’s user is to order food. To understand the issues that visually impaired users are possibly facing, a Hierarchical Task Analysis was created to visualise the whole process of ordering food.

The functionalities of installing the application (Figure 2 – Flow 1), creating an account (Figure 2 – Flow 8) and setting up the location (Figure 2 – Flow 2) are out of the scope for this project. It will be assumed that the user already has an account, is logged in and the food will be delivered to the user’s current location. For the items within the scope of this project, the current user journey is as demonstrated in the flowchart in Figure 3 and Video 1.

Video 1. Video of the Deliveroo current ‘Order Food’ task.

References

Greenberg, S. (2004)  Working Through Task-Centered System Design.  In: Diaper, D. and Stanton, N. (2004) The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human-Computer Interaction.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Jonassen, D., Hannum, W., Tessmer, M., (1989) Handbook of Task Analysis Procedures, Praeger.

Stanton, N.A. (2006). Hierarchical task analysis: developments, applications, and extensions. Applied Ergonomics. Volume 37 Pages 55-79

Usability.gov (n.d.)Task Analysis. Usability.gov. Retrieved from https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/task-analysis.html

Scenarios

Scenarios help to communicate the essence of the idea of the product or service within a defined context of use. User’s actions are unpredictable but mapping some scenarios can be useful to comprehend the limitations of the solution. The product has to adapt to the contextual use, not the opposite.

According to Cooper (2007), “Goal-Directed scenarios are an iterative means of defining the behaviour of a product from the standpoint of specific users (personas)”. The optimal experience needs to consider external factors that might influence the experience. The scenarios affect the way of thinking about the user’s interaction and the solution itself directly.

Journey Map of  the current experience

According to Kaplan (2016), the journey map is a way to visualise the journey of the user throughout the process of accomplishing their goals. The journey maps are used to understand the needs of the users and to fix their pain-points. In order to visualise the current journey and to locate opportunities and fixes on the user process, a journey map was generated (Figure 1). In the as-is scenario mapping, the steps  the main proto-persona takes are documented, together with feelings, thoughts and opportunities that might arise from mapping the journey. Locating the pain points throughout the task help empathise with the personas and also help the researchers understand the problems that they face when trying to achieve their goals.

One of the issues detected is that the visually impaired users cannot input their card numbers unless they have it memorised or in a media accessible to them. At the beginning of the project, it was assumed that users could read the embossed numbers in bank cards. This is not the case, unless the visually impaired user knows Arabic numbers. Also the CVV numbers (usually a 3-digit number at the back of the card) are not embossed, which makes it inaccessible to visually impaired users. Different solutions were designed to solve this issue but it requires the adoption by card issuers (Figure 2). It is important to notice that it is an outside factor that can have a significant impact on the efforts to improve the accessibility of the product.

Figure 2. Example of bank cards accessible for visually impaired users.

At the beginning of the project, the goal was to test the full checkout process. The user would select the restaurant, the dishes, pay for the items and receive the order. Because of the issue with the bank cards not being accessible to blind users, the payment area became out of the scope, and it was assumed that the user had the payment details already set in the app.

Storyboard and To-Be Scenario

Storyboard is the visual representation of interactions between users and systems in a sequence of drawings. According to Babich (2017), stories are the most powerful delivery method for information because it is easier to be understood, they are more memorable than facts (Bruner, 1986), viewers tend to empathise more with characters who have struggles similar to our own and people are hardwired to respond to stories.

The current user journey (Figure 1) displayed opportunities that can be incorporated into the future developments of Deliveroo. The storyboard presented in Figure 3 incorporates the vision of the solution to be proposed with the addition of some of the opportunities identified.

For the To-Be Scenario, the trigger is Emma being hungry after a day’s work; even though she can cook, she does not feel like doing it. Emma then opens the Deliveroo app on her phone, and because she is at home and comfortable to do so, she uses voice commands to filter the restaurants available. Emma then speaks-out the dishes she wants and selects the extras. After payment, the app notifies Emma about the next steps, the time it will take and when the driver arrives. Finally, Emma gets her Pad Thai and she feels empowered by how frictionless  her experience was.

References

Babich, N. (2017, April 30). Storyboarding in UX Design. UX Planet.  Retrieved from https://uxplanet.org/storyboarding-in-ux-design-b9d2e18e5fab

Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D., & Cooper, A. (2007). About face 3: The essentials of interaction design. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley

Kaplan, K. (2016, July 31). When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/