UCD Techniques for Shad MUN 2008

Dear Shads of Shad MUN 2008:

It was great meeting you all over the last few days, and getting to know you as individuals and your projects as well!

Below is the link to some slides from the UCD Workshop on July 10, 2008: UCD Workshop Slides - Shad MUN 2008

| View | Upload your own

Here's a link to a nice site on how to write personas and scenarios (a slightly different take from mine): 10 Steps to Personas

Please see the details below, and I look forward to reading your personas and scenarios on this blog soon!

Thanks and Regards,
- Patanjali

Posting User Profiles & Scenarios

User-Centered Design is both an art and a science. It's a design philosophy that places the end-user at the center of the design process, and strongly believes that insights from users often provide the most compelling and relevant solutions to everyday problems. Quite often, it's in the analysis and comparison of these insights that the most interesting solutions are revealed.

As you come up with your user profiles, and user scenarios, take a few moments to share some of those insights with us here. Tell us about at least one of your users, what they do, what they care about, and how they view the world, and give us a short real-life anecdote (i.e. scenario) that gives us enough context to start to appreciate the world that user lives in.

Some suggestions and guidelines for sharing these user profiles and scenarios:

1. Name your user (use a fictitious one if you must) that represents who they are (i.e. a Persona)
• Sometimes you may not be able to use a person's real name for confidentiality reasons. Check with them before you do! Otherwise, fake names are fine, as long as they are relevant and help us understand who the user really is.
  
  
2. Give a brief, few sentence description of your motivation for looking at this user
   (i.e. your design problem)
   
   
3. Describe in a few bullets on who your user is, what they do, where they come from, where they live, etc.
   
   
4. Write a scenario that describes a day-in-the-life or period-in-the-life of that user, so we can get an idea of their experience. (Hint: Use quotes from actual users whenever you can! Quotes provide some realness to the user scenario.).
   
   
5. Upload any photos and/or videos as well (you can use youtube to host them)!

Happy Sharing!

Welcome to the Designers Workshop!

In 2007, I conducted a User-Centered Design Workshop at the Shad Valley Program hosted at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Canada (Shad UBC '07), as part of marking my 20th Anniversary (aka Shadversary) since I first attended the program back in 1987 (Shad Manitoba '87).

Shad Valley (www.shad.ca) is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, summer program for high potential youth. It brings together the best and the brightest high-school students at one of several host universities across Canada to expose them to cutting-edge concepts and research in science, technology, entrepreneurship and more. The program has played a significant role in nurturing many of Canada and the world's intellectual and entrepreneurial elite, including producing over 17 Rhodes Scholars, and spawning innumerable startups.

This year (2008), I'm heading to the opposite end of the country, to conduct a similar workshop at the Shad program being hosted at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL Canada. And I decided that it would be great to start to capture some of the ideas around user-centered design that come out of the participants of this workshop.

The following blog is meant to serve as a host for every designer's main audience -- their users! I hope this will become a place where every Shad attending this workshop starts to share what they learn about their users -- what makes their users unique, different, and relevant.

Over time, my goal is that this becomes a repository of some great user stories, so that any designer (which is just about anyone, because at some level, we are all "designers" of some form or another in this world) can benefit and learn from the insights users bring to the craft of design.