ABRAM COETSEE

capstone

Case Study

MODE: Rideshare

Personas

Once affinity and empathy mapping allowed me to explore and synthesize common patterns in user sensibilities, I turned to personas, which humanized the abstractions of the design process. Taking time to create a wide range of personas was crucial. The key lesson from user research: even the most common themes are always determined by the most specific contexts. 

To do justice to any individual user demographic, I often needed to create more than one persona: we know that the same person has very different goals, fears and desires on a work trip than when they’re celebrating a major occasion.

What I did with personas

As I attempted an accurate representation in any of these personas, I was consistently surprised by the degree of psychological intensity that accumulated over the course of a shared ride. Users nearly always enter the situation while juggling a confluence of factors. A general lack of predictably continues until they find a moment of assurance, which is usually only once they’ve entered their destination safely.

Personas led me to continually reduce the number of actions a user had to take to find assurances about the feelings they wanted across a range of experiences. Even after completing the project, I’m still musing about more elegant ways to balance quick access to the features that users valued most, while strategizing ways to reduce cognitive overhead. That means two things: designing to ask less of them, and designing engagement that supersedes the noisy and stressful parts of their experience.