从交流工具到设计工具——人物角色在头脑风暴中的应用

From Communication Tool to Design Tool——a Comparative Study on Effects of Personas in Brainstorming

人物角色是以用户为中心设计的重要工具之一,主要被用作沟通交流的工具,将用户研究的结果呈现和传递给产品设计的相关人员。该研究将人物角色作为设计工具,将其实验性地应用到头脑风暴的概念设计过程中,实验结果发现人物角色可以促进概念设计的效率和改善概念设计的效果。研究同时也说明了设计师既要不断学习新的设计工具或方法,也需要对已经掌握的工具和方法进行不断的尝试,只有这样才能更有效地激励设计创意和改善用户体验。

Personas are results from user studies and viewed as a design and a communication tool in user-centered design or innovation processes. There were already many studies addressing how to create good personas but what types of personas and how personas could help in ideation processes were less discussed in past works. In this paper, a comparative study to explore effects of personas on the ideation process and idea qualities in a brainstorming setting was conducted. Two design groups were assigned to complete the same two design tasks with either personas presented or not. Observations were conducted on their design processes and ten experts in the fields were invited to evaluate the final deliverables from both groups. The results indicated that personas could enhance the ideation process and final deliverables on two aspects： personas could help both individual designer and a group of designers focus on the target user group during the ideation process; and the delivered ideas or concepts were viewed more relevant to the user groups and were more comprehensive. Moreover, it was also discovered that personas need to provide more detailed information of users to enhance ideation processes in early stage of UCD especially in brainstorming sessions.