User research
Interviews and Analysis
First Round of Interviews
The first step in our project was research to understand the people we were designing this system for. To gain this knowledge, we chose to conduct interviews. However, we designed the questions we asked to prompt story-telling rather than short answers. This way we could gain a rich set of data on traveling. Initially we set no limits on our interviewees; we simply went to Point State Park and interviewed anyone who looked like a traveler. We conducted 4 interviews in during our first round of interviews, all of whom we found taking pictures or looking at a map. Three of our interviews were with families with small children, and the fourth was what we shall call a “wander traveler” (defined later). We synthesized what we learned from these interviews via discussion and an affinity diagram and, after presenting our results to our class, determined that we did not have enough data.
[Notes from the first round of interviews as a .doc file, including the ideas for questions to ask.]Second Round of Interviews
After re-working our questions and narrowing our focus to young adults, we conducted 6 more interviews the next week; two in Kiva Han (an off-beat coffee shop), two on Mount Washington (a tourist attraction) and two more in Point State Park. These included two international travelers; a pair from Costa Rica and a young woman from Russia who was another “wander traveler”. There were also two bicyclists and another “wander traveler” we nick-named “Tattoo girl”, who influenced our persona the most.
[Notes from the second round of interviews as a .doc file, including the ideas for questions to ask.]Interview Analysis /& results
From our affinity diagram and discussion of all the interviews, we found that almost all our interviewees asked friends, the concierge at their hotel, and/or friendly-looking strangers for advice and suggestions. This included things to do, places to eat, and directions. Also, all but one of our interviewees had a cell phone on them. Basically no-one wanted to use it, however; they all said they just had it as a back-up. Only one person mentioned using their phone to contact anyone for help other than friends.
Affinity diagram of all the interview results.
We also discovered two types of traveling from our affinity diagram and discussion. The first was “planned” traveling, and the second “wander” traveling. In planned traveling, the travelers planed before-hand what they were going to do and when; they picked out events (tours, sports events, etc.) that they wanted or needed to go to – including the reason for their trip. Wander traveling, on the other hand, consisted of showing up and wandering around; seeing what you ran into and exploring the place.
All the trips described in our interviews appeared to consist of a mix between the two types of traveling. However, three of the people we talked to were doing almost pure wander traveling with basically no planning – the people we called “wander travelers”. All the other people also had at least some wandering planned into their trip. Beyond its high incidence, wander traveling is interesting because it represents more of a mobile need. By definition, planned traveling involves knowing where you are going and what is happening before you arrive. In wander traveling, on the other hand, there is less preparation and less knowledge of the area.
We chose to focus on wander traveling for these reasons and also because it posed a challenge. How do you provide information without destroying that sense of exploration and discovery? How do you design a system for someone who wants to be in the “real world” and not on their phone all the time?
Persona
After our research, we created a persona to capture the important information from our interviews. This was to be an extreme user; one that was not typical, but one whose needs encompassed the needs of a large portion of our target user base. Since we chose to focus on wander traveling, we based our persona on “Tattoo girl” – one of the almost pure wander travelers.
Tattoo girl is a student of photography at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and is also working a low-paying job to get her through. She was a navy brat, so she grew up traveling. She still loves to travel, but doesn’t get much of a chance because of time and money. Her nick-name comes from the gorgeous color tattoo of an Asian woman on her right shoulder. She also has several piercings and a very philosophical attitude about things.
[First version of the persona as a .doc file.]Initially our persona was Tattoo girl with very few tweaks. We named her Tasha, made her a bicyclist, and fleshed out a lot of details that we had not gotten from our interview with Tattoo girl. We included the bicycling because we wanted to encompass some aspects of the two bicyclists we interviewed, and also to be able to express our idea of our map system having downloadable layers specific to any interest. Having Tasha be a bicyclist means that she could have a “Bike the World” layer to her map, with such things as bike repair shops, good biking trails, etc. However, in presenting our persona, we determined that the bicycling thing was simply a distraction. Also, in looking for a picture of “Tasha”, we decided the name “Jenny” suited her much better.
Finally, it was pointed out to us that making Jenny older would make her a better extreme user. Being older, and out of college, Jenny would have more good friends scattered throughout the world. Thus she would have more friends to visit, as well as more people to receive advice from on the places she visits. Being out of college and a free-lance photographer also means that Jenny would have the flexibility to travel a lot more often. From this and a few more tweaks, we trimmed and polished Jenny down to a very useful persona.
[Final version of the persona as a .doc file.]