Abstract
This study focuses on a brand new type of user research as a part of a design project conducted in 2012 Summer School Project Studio in the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey. Students are required to get information from an open Facebook profile by concentrating on its demographics (age, gender, and nationality), descriptive attributes, mottos, likes, dislikes, hates, beliefs, activities, work attitudes, holiday attitudes, socializations and favourite objects etc. They are expected to propose some keywords and concepts to describe the persona after learning from the Facebook profile. By depending on these keywords, they are required to develop mood boards to summarize, abstract the data to generalize the persona to represent a real user group. This is supported by an exercise in which students fill a fictitious shopping cart of the persona according to the so-called buying habits of him/her. Finally, they are expected to act as the persona they developed in a role playing session in couples to enliven the persona and enhance the degree of empathy. This paper benefits from persona forms, mood boards and video recordings and aims to question whether new sources of social network such as Facebook is helpful as new and progressive tools for design research and education.
Keywords
Social network, User research, Persona, Design education
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.053
Citation
Gelmez, K.,and Bagli, H.(2013) Social Network as a Tool to Develop Personas for User Research: An Exercise from Design Education, in Reitan, J.B., Lloyd, P., Bohemia, E., Nielsen, L.M., Digranes, I., & Lutnæs, E. (eds.), DRS // Cumulus: Design Learning for Tomorrow, 14-17 May, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.053
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Social Network as a Tool to Develop Personas for User Research: An Exercise from Design Education
This study focuses on a brand new type of user research as a part of a design project conducted in 2012 Summer School Project Studio in the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey. Students are required to get information from an open Facebook profile by concentrating on its demographics (age, gender, and nationality), descriptive attributes, mottos, likes, dislikes, hates, beliefs, activities, work attitudes, holiday attitudes, socializations and favourite objects etc. They are expected to propose some keywords and concepts to describe the persona after learning from the Facebook profile. By depending on these keywords, they are required to develop mood boards to summarize, abstract the data to generalize the persona to represent a real user group. This is supported by an exercise in which students fill a fictitious shopping cart of the persona according to the so-called buying habits of him/her. Finally, they are expected to act as the persona they developed in a role playing session in couples to enliven the persona and enhance the degree of empathy. This paper benefits from persona forms, mood boards and video recordings and aims to question whether new sources of social network such as Facebook is helpful as new and progressive tools for design research and education.