Persona 1 (with scenarios): Kicki

Background

Kicki Persson is 37 years old and works at a Coop-store in central Stockholm. She lives in Jakobsberg with her wife Jenna and two kids. The kids, who are 9 and 11 years old respectively, both attend the local culture school to play the trumpet in the orchestra, dance and do drama. Kicki and Jenna organize dropping and picking up the kids, making dinner and helping the kids with their homework while still managing to get to Jenna’s roller derby practices twice a week. Kicki herself sings in a choir once a week.

Personality

Kicki is a calm, organized person who likes to wind down at the end of the day, since her job can be very stressful with a lot of people snapping at her when they pay for their groceries. She loves spending time with her family and wishes she had more nights free to just cuddle up with Jenna in front of the TV.

Today

Kicki takes the commuter train every day to work via the central station. She looks at the journey home as a time she can use to calm down after a long day at the store and get some energy for the remaining night. She tries to not be bothered by the amount of people on the train or the fact that they are often late, and looks at the view instead, but sometimes it annoys her as well.

Sofie’s Scenario “SL-app”:

Kicki is on the commuter train on her way home from work. She is tired after a long day at work, and still feeling a little bit stressed. Kicki knows that she in one hour have to be at the culture school with her kids, and she is trying to figure out how they will get there in time because right now she is sitting on the delayed train.

Kicki uses the SL-app to decide which bus she has to catch in Jakobsberg to continue to the next destination. She thinks it is annoying that the train is late again, but she is quite used to it by now, so the whole family knows what to do to make it work anyway. She calls her kids and tells them when to take the bus from the bus stop outside their house and that she will jump on the same bus at Jakobsbergs station. After that she continues her ride back home, hoping that the train won’t get stuck in a train line.

Koski’s Scenario “A good day”

Kicki arrives at the station, beeps her ticket and walks in a steady pace up to the platform. She has timed today really well and the train rolls in after two minutes, just the right time for Kicki to start some music in her headphones. Today is Friday and there is not as many people as during the other weekdays.

Despite it being less people than usual, Kicki does not get a seat today. She stands by the doors leaning towards the wall being able to look out the big window. There is not much sound around Kicki because she stands away from the grouped seats where the talkative people usually sit. The music pauses a short while when the train is passing through the tunnel. Kicki takes a few breaths and listens to the silence in her part of the train cart and briefly lays eyes on the commercial poster in front of her before the train is out of the tunnel and the music starts again.The train goes the distance without problems and arrives at Karlberg on time. After a walk home, the work of cooking dinner for two hungry kids and her wife awaits.

Making of persona and scenarios

Persona (Elisabet)

When establishing requirements for a product, you need to think about user characteristics. A persona is a rich description of a typical user of a product, “realistic rather than idealized”. A persona needs to have goals, as well as a description of skills, attitudes, tasks and environment.

When I made my persona I looked at what the data we had gathered during the field studies and made my own character out of the things that seemed relevant to the persona type I had the task to make.

Scenario (Sofie)

In the literature a scenario is described as something that “describes activities and context of use but can also include a “day in the life” of a person”. That’s why I decided to describe a normal situation that I think the Persona (Kicki) faces often. A scenario often contains something that the persona tries to achieve, a goal, and in my case it is to reach the culture school in time together with her kids even though she is sitting on a delayed train at the moment. To achieve this goal I’m describing a possible use of the SL-app. I’ve written the scenario with the vocabulary of the users and it is supposed to be an informal narrative description, which is important because then it is easier for the Stakeholders to understand. A persona and its’ scenarios can be used for showing needs, requirements and describe the context to the Stakeholders.

But one scenario doesn’t cover the full set of requirements, it is only offering one perspective.

Scenario (Koski)

I started creating my scenario by reading through our interviews and the persona Kicki. The level of detail will not be very high because we are in the beginning of the development phase and we want a broad and general view on what could happen during a persona's voyage. We learned from the interviews about all the different ways the commute with the Pendeltåg can go wrong, but we did not get that many mentions about what makes a good trip. So the scenario I then created is based on a regular travelers ordinary calm day. According to the course book, “Interaction design” 2nd Edition (p. 505-508) a scenario is a description about how a user achieves a certain goal. The goal for our travelers in all of our scenarios is to get from point A to point B. Many times this goes smoothly with no traffic disturbances like in this scenario. By making a well formed scenario we can then when making our application look back to the scenario to see what different requirements the users are missing in their scenario.