Project 1 - Customer Profile-nodate
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Project One: Customer Profile
This task is worth 25 points.
Please submit on D2L.
Introduction
The Customer (Segment) Profile
describes a specific customer segment in
a more structured and detailed way. It
eaks the customer down into jobs,
pains, and gains.
Customer Jobs describe what customers
are trying to get done in their work and in
their lives, as expressed in their own
words. What you think of as important
from your perspective might not be a job
customers are actually trying to get done.
Pains describe bad outcomes, risks, and obstacles related to customer jobs.
Gains describe the outcomes customers want to achieve or the concrete
enefits they are seeking.
The goal of describing a specific customer profile is to come up with a product
or service solution that will address the tasks customers are trying to perform,
the problems they are trying to solve, or the needs they are trying to satisfy.
After you described the customer profile, and found out everything you
needed to know about those customers, you need to define the customer
persona or archetype.
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What is a persona?
When we say "persona", designers generally mean some methodological
descendant of the work of Alan Cooper’s 1999 book, “The Inmates are Running
the Asylum.” The gist of Cooper's argument is fairly straightforward: There
will be far greater success in design work that meets the goals of one specific
person, instead of trying to design for the various needs of many. It may seem
counterintuitive to design for just one person, whether hypothetical or not.
First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names,
personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable
constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins
with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users.
Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and
what are the design needs to fulfill them. Here is a
ief summary:
• Personas are hypothetical archetypes, or "stand-ins" for actual users that drive the
decision making for interface design projects.
• Personas are not real people, but they represent real people throughout the design
process.
• Personas are not "made up"; they are discovered as a by-product of the investigative
process of understanding the customer profile.
• Although personas are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and
precision.
• Names and personal details are made up for personas to make them more realistic.
• Personas are defined by their goals.
• Value designs are built to satisfy personas' needs and goals.
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Assignment Instructions
As stated, it is assumed that personas are much more effective if they start
with a single, actual person as the model.
1. Prepare for the assignment by considering an experience you (or others)
have as a user of a cu
ent IT product, service, or system. The experience
must be complex enough to generate pains and gains.
2. Although we are starting with the customer profile, there is an expected
design solution to consider later. The more salient the experience, the
etter.
3. Set the scene. Where did the experience take place? What is the context
(e.g., hospital, classroom, work, vacation)?
4. What goal is/are the customer(s) trying to accomplish?
5. Create a customer profile (jobs, pains and gains). The customer can be
about: (1) you as the main customer segment, (2) someone you know who
you interview, or (3) more than one person in your department, unit,
household who you can interview.
6. From the customer profile, write at least one persona to provide the design
team a good mental model of the customers you got to know.
References:
Note: The readings and videos are about starting a new business, but for our
purposes, the value proposition is about a design solution that will achieve a fit
with the customer profile.
✓ Reading from D2L.
•Osterwalder, Pigneur, et al. (2014). Part 1: Value Design and Customer
Profile, pp. 3-25 (also on D2L assignments and Week 1).
✓ Tutorial by Alex Cowan on “Personas” at http:
www.alexandercowan.com
tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories/
✓ Persona Example on D2L (Week 1).
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https:
drive.google.com/open?id=0BxJ-o_ir5232UXZCOHUzeVJWN3M
https:
drive.google.com/open?id=0BxJ-o_ir5232UXZCOHUzeVJWN3M
http:
www.alexandercowan.com/tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories
http:
www.alexandercowan.com/tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories
http:
www.alexandercowan.com/tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories/