Iteration based on the personas and requirements

After working with our personas we turned to the literature to find out how we ought to use the personas in the design process. One major area of discussion for us was the area of requirements, in particular user requirements in relation to our newly created personas. The main user requirements we established for our product were: 1) The user should not require prompts and instructions to use the product and 2) The user should not have to spend a lot of time with the product. 1 and 2 are close related but still decisively different. We identified 1 as a requirement because the nature of the intended product: we want the product to be clear enough so that the user doesn't have to have any particular skills to use the product nor should the user have to spend time learning to use the product through prompts. 2 on the other hand deals with the fact that as the product is to be used while in a museum we don't want the use of the product to take up too much of the time the user could be spending admiring the artworks at the museum. Both 1 and 2 are in line with our personas, neither one has any particular interest in learning to use a new system and both personas have come to the museum to be calm and escape the stress of normal life, not to spend a long time operating our product.

Thus, based on the user requirements identified above, we iterated our design. The main change of the product was decreasing the amount of information on the map screen and making all the symbols as easy to recognize as possible. This made it so that the user only needed to take a short glance at the main map to see which halls were clogged with people and which halls were not, thus helping to balance the load of visitors in the museum.

As we were working with user requirements we also realized that due to the specific environment where the product was to be used (the museum) there were also some environmental requirements to consider. Chief among these was the fact that the product should not interfere with the audio and visual atmosphere of the museum. To do this we made the whole product completely quiet and reasoned that the panels ought only be installed in specific locations outside the galleries as to not disturb the visitors.