Having decided on designing a Device for transmitting medical details (e.g. blood pressure) straight to a GP, which is targeted at the older generation. One problem that we have as a group is access to older members of society in order to involve them in our project so that our designs can be tailored to them.
A useful tool by which we can base our designs around the older generation is to use what is called a persona. A persona is a fictional character, which has attitudes, goals, behavioural patterns, skills, and an environment.
Using a number of personas we as a group will be able to involve the thoughts of the older generation in our design based on what our persona’s attitudes, skills and behavioural patterns are etc.
When designing personas it is important that we get the correct balance of characters involved and that they are relevant to the product that we our designing. For instance the would be no point creating personas who were under 60 as we are designing for people over 60, and there would be no point creating personas who were all fit and healthy and had absolutely no interest in technology whatsoever as we are trying to design a piece of technology which is based around health. Just as well if we were to create personas who were all absolutely computer literate and knew everything there is to know about technology then, when someone who wasn’t quite sure about technology tries to use our product we may find that we have over looked a number of design issues by making assumptions about the users level of competence.The design of our persons is a very important part of our design process; here our some links to websites about designing good personas.
http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm
http://research.microsoft.com/research/coet/Grudin/Personas/Pruitt-Grudin.pdf
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/making_personas_more_powerful_details_to_drive_strategic_and_tactical_design
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