Thursday, September 18, 2014

Pre-seminar thoughts on the literature - 3


Reading the literature really got me thinking about what we can do to best understand our target group, families with children. As the literature states, it’s very easy to think that you understand the needs and problems these people might have in the environment of a museum, but since none of us have children, and since we haven’t been children for some time, that might be an incorrect assumption. One has to forget ones prejudice about the problem, so that ones own idea has as little influence as possible on the answers of the interview.

We also have to take into consideration that what the client (the museum) demand might conflict with what the users want. They might have constrains that come in direct conflict with what the users, or they might think that the design has to look a certain way in order to match the rest of the museums brand. As the main event in a museum is the exhibitions, it’s also reasonable to presume that the client might have opinions about how much the design can interfere with those. How will we prioritize in these cases? In which parts of our design should we let the users needs be more important than the clients, and vice versa, in order to maximize the success metrics? And what are our success metrics?


In order to be successful in our designing and in deciding what “being successful” means in our case, I think we really need to be constantly aware of whom we are designing for. It’s important to really have a deep understanding of the target group. Since we can’t conduct interviews and ask them about their opinions in every step of the process, creating personas that we can revisit might be a good substitute. I think it will make it easier to empathize and understand the user. These personas should all fall into the target group, but be as diverse as that condition allows.

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