DAVE’S USER PERSONA
A user persona is the development of a fictional character who is a representative of the intended audience. The purpose follows to reflect the goals and behaviour of the hypothetical users to help designers visualise the user experience.
Some of the fundamental questions that need to be considered when creating user personas include:
What are the tasks the user is trying to perform?
Are there different tasks for different personas?
Instructional design revolves around a visual hierarchy which teaches the audience how something works or how to do something. Poorly directed instructions affect the user experience greatly which ultimately makes the product undesirable and useless. It is important to account for the cultural differences as well as the targeted audience to successfully create an instructional design.
The basic design patterns include:
Using the program Adobe Illustrator, creating wireframes and mockups are essential to develop which enables the designer to envision what the final outcome will roughly look like. By implementing the ‘Layers’ tool, it allows the product engineer to slowly build their interactive prototype. Through the use of guides, having these foundations are helpful in ways that are powerfully informative to the designer and their team.
Below is a continued example of ‘How to Make Toast’.
The design process should not be overlooked as it provides the designer with insights to their production. In fact, it is during this progression where they fully develop their existing ideas as well as promoting new ones. Bill Verplank breaks this process down into 8 simple phases.
Error – Idea – Metaphor – Scenario – Task – Model – Representation (Prototype) – Manipulation (Interaction)
Through these early developments, it helps the designer to understand, define and frame what needs to be solved and how to overcome it. For example, using a context scenario allows the designer to observe and comprehend the situation, the people and their needs in order to successfully reach their goal.
This is a collaborative project based on the First Aid – Red Cross App. As a team, we deconstructed the interactive to understand how all the elements conjoined into one to produce the instructional design.
The Red Cross App provides an inbuilt interactive interface that allows users to react in real time to emergency and disaster events.
The app enables users to choose from a multitude of scenarios and provides solutions facilitated through back end flowcharts which narrow down possible cause/effect and solutions. Below is a link to a short video which introduces the general use of the app.