Design the Audience

Remember that the twist on the assignment is that you will be evaluated not just on the service concept but also on the creativity and insight you show in defining and describing the audience. Mat is hoping for you to come up with an audience that is interesting, unique and ultimately surprises him - based upon your understanding of the untapped feelings, sentiments, obsessions or behaviours of people.

For example:
Last night, Al Gore gave his "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation at UofT. We might reason that this presentation has gained a lot of public attention because it responds to a shared belief that we need to rethink relationship with the environment. We should also recognize that some people feel guilty about their current actions (eg. driving an SUV when you believe in the danger of CO emissions).

The obvious audience here could be loosely characterized as 'people who feel compelled to learn more about their environmental footprint and want to learn what they can do to help reduce their impact.' This audience is obvious, exists and is already understood (to the tune of $23,727,472 in box office, $7,270,000 in rentals.) For this assignment we want you to use your personal insights to uncover a unifying motivation that will collect a less obvious group.

In this case, we might could recognize that some of the people initially collected by Gore's presentation are getting sick of feeling guilty about things that are "too big" or "beyond their control". So to pull these people into an audience, we might design a web-based mobile service that personally congratulates or even rewards people (perhaps in a humourous way) for their environmentally destructive behaviour - when and where they do it.

(unfortunately the domain name www.fucktheenvironment.com already exists.)

Not a very socially consious example - but I hope it helps.

Procrastination

I am not sure if it can be used in anyway in our class, but nonetheless, I thought it was a very interesting presentation of studied data.

Enjoy,




Anth

http://webapps2.ucalgary.ca/~steel/Procrastinus/theories.php

Kim Goodwin's : Persona Archetype

Hi all, a great overview and reference on persona creation by Kim Goodwin of Cooper Interaction Design.

"A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype. In most cases, personas are synthesized from a series of ethnographic interviews with real people, then captured in 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life. For each product, or sometimes for each set of tools within a product, there is a small set of personas, one of whom is the primary focus for the design."

Read the full article here: http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm

WoW...Just WOW

I, regrettably, have not had too much free time available to me to play my new World of Warcraft expansion...don't worry this is not for me to complain. However, I was thinking about he interactivity of the whole game, and I was judging it as an experience...and...well...I thought there is one element missing from this game, guidance. All of the experience factors and transitions are fulfilled in this game but in the engagement, some are lost because they quite literally get lost. That is when, for no reason but boredom, did I stumble upon this site...let's just call it by what it is...

Google Azeroth (Azeroth is the main world in the game)
http://mapwow.com/