Personas based support tool for requirements elicitation

Lack of user understanding can bring a damaging effect to software development projects. As we acknowledge, there is a wide variety of users in each software project and consequently there are variation of goals, needs and attitudes within the establishment of users' requirements.So, there are difficulties in organizing and categorizing these information and also, in validating these requirements within a development project. Using personas to capture and analyze users can facilitate user’s understanding.However, identifying personas from large user information is difficult.This research examines the persona technique and proposes a software support tool to help developers in gathering and analyzing requirements by using personas.Likewise, the goals and tasks of each persona are established via actual requirements of the users.The creation and utilization of persona have been investigated via proposed tool aimed to elicit and represent users' requirements in a manageable format. A “Personas based Support Tool for Requirements Elicitation (PSTRE)” facilitates software developers to gather and analyze user requirements.The resulting personas which are suggested by the proposed tool, have to be well understood and well presented to the development team and also provide easy way to extract main functionalities and features of the proposed system

Journey into the user experience: creating a library website that's not for librarians

Auckland University of Technology Library started work on a major redevelopment of its website in 2012. The problem was that the website content, as is the case for many library websites, had been written by librarians with almost no user input. The challenge was to redesign the website, rethinking our entire focus and placing the user at the centre of the process. This is the story of a journey of transformational change based on our user-centric approach. We believe we have achieved what we set out to do and created a website that’s built not for librarians but for users

Towards reusable personas for everyday design

Personas are artificial character based representations of user goals, attitudes, motivations and abilities which enable designers to focus their design efforts on key, targeted users. The success of personas in design is due to their capacity to enable designers to empathize with users and understand user goals. Persona development is rooted in the rigorous collection and analysis of data specifically related to the design project being undertaken. New design projects thus require the development of new personas. Since redevelopment is not always achievable attention has turned towards reuse of personas and the underlying data. This paper reports on ongoing research into the development of reusable personas for use by non-expert, everyday designers. Such designers are regularly faced with small scale but diverse design challenges for which they cannot carry out user research and modelling. They can, however, make use of general, reusable personas developed independently of their current design project

Examining Virtual Reality As An Empathizing Tool For Early Ideation Stage in Design

Master of Industrial Design ProjectA project book detailing the master's project contents, its chronology, how the project was prepared and its findings and observations.Whenever there is a new design project to undertake, one of the first and most important steps is to empathize and immerse oneself into the design brief early in the design process in order to gain a better understanding of the problem space and be able to create concepts that accurately target the design context. Some of the traditional tools employed by industrial designers include; sketching, storytelling, journey/mind mapping, persona exploration, post-it note brainstorming, role-playing and field observation. However, some of these tools in the early stages of the design process rely heavily on the designer's imagination, assumption or prior knowledge of the design context which could be flawed, inaccurate or not current. Other methods such as field observation or traditional research requires effort and time and as far as field observation goes, certain elements, behaviours or other factors may not be replicated or duplicated easily for further and thorough examination. This project aims to investigate immersive Virtual Reality as an effective tool for the early design stage compared to traditional industrial design methods. Leveraging by off-the-shelf technology, it is easy to film 360 degree videos in the context of Virtual Reality, which can capture an immersive scenario that can be replayed and reviewed by designers in order to discover problem spaces/design opportunities with empathizing the problem space. This project examined a group of participants in order to conduct a simple design challenge involving designing an external visual communication system for autonomous shuttles in the pick-up phase of shuttle riding. One team will use virtual reality to empathize with the context while the second team will use traditional methods of empathizing. The design methods as well as the designs themselves are evaluated by the participants and a third panel body including experts in industry and the general masters of industrial design student body and the evaluation scores are measured to compare the effectiveness of both virtual reality and traditional methods. Findings reveal that while traditional industrial design empathizing tools are more effective in some areas compared to Virtual Reality, V.R. was able to perform as a usable system for empathizing and offers vast potential as am empathizing tool in other more challenging design scenarios

The Design of Compelling Narratives

While storytelling is an essential form of communication and has been used to help humans make sense of the world and prepare for the future for thousands of years, compelling narratives are designed storytelling systems that encourage the audience to get involved and make active thought and behavioral change. Another significant aspect of compelling narrative design is that they are not resolute. While stories have definite endings, the end of a compelling narrative should be a “call to action”, an opportunity to engage further and invest time, effort, or aid back into the narrative’s cause. The challenge for designers is how can we use this design process to leverage the educational, entertaining, and empathic nature of storytelling to change behavior and prompt meaningful interactions? Prezolution is a political campaign game, set in America in the year 2040, which encourages non-partisan political discussion and problem solving. In the game, the traditional two-party system has disappeared, leaving and opportunity for much more diverse candidates and their ideas to emerge in order to help solve more complex issues than we have ever faced as a country before. The extension of the board game to the online platform changes the experience from an individual story into a larger compelling narrative system. When we can bring together diverse audiences to share their values, ideas, and visions for our future, we may find common goals that unite us and inspire active investment in shaping our future together

Doldrum

Doldrum is a VR rhythm game that provides the player with a sense of flow and a feeling of triumph as they overcome a towering boss. The game mixes traditional rhythm game elements with reaction-based combat. The player battles a villainous, animated Cuckoo Boss via beating on a mystical xylophone. They must keep rhythm, avoid enemy attacks, and perform specific actions to combat their opponent

DOLDRUM

Doldrum is a VR rhythm game that provides the player with a sense of flow and a feeling of triumph as they overcome a towering boss. The game mixes traditional rhythm game elements with reaction-based combat. The player battles a villainous, animated Cuckoo Boss via beating on a mystical xylophone. They must keep rhythm, avoid enemy attacks, and perform specific actions to combat their opponent