Now we’ve established how Languages serves our business goals, identified the market, and sized up the competition. We’re convinced that the app is a good idea. The preliminary investigation ends. We can now pull out the microscope to analyze our potential users.
We first have to identify all of their relevant characteristics. We have a leg up, in this regard, because I happen to be a linguaphile. I’ve studied various languages seriously (Espanol, Italiano, Deutsch) and have dabbled in many more (Latin, Greek, Swedish, Old English). I’ve studied languages over an extended period of time and in many academic contexts. I’ve used all sorts of translation dictionaries, physical, digital, and mobile. So I basically embody many of our use-cases (not the business one, unfortunately).
After thinking about it, doing some research, and banging around ideas, we come up with a list that runs the gamut of user characteristics. It looks something like this:
We identify which of these characteristics we should focus on. We decide to not worry about the professorial use-case, reasoning that foreign-language professors either won’t need Languages or will demand something much more academic and rigorous than we want to provide. We put asterisks beside the characteristics that we deem important.
We take the salient characteristics and click them together into several personas. These personas, on the one hand, embody the important user-characteristics; but they also help us think about how our app fits in the context of a real person’s life. Personas bring us out of the abstract and into the concrete. And we find that abstract thinking is the death of good UX. Concreteness, on the other hand, forms the foundation of good design.
We then come up with this:
Now we’re designing for “actual” people. We can now barrel ahead into the next stage of strategic design: mapping out the user’s experience.
We’re going to need a wall for this.
