F26 CS 449 / 649 Week 3
Lecture
- Understanding people
- Personas
- Empathy mapping
- Exploratory methods
- Interviews
- Slides
Studio Prep
- Each team member should independently develop a rough draft of a persona (3 -4 sentences). Personas are your best guesses about who you will design for, and represent the type of people whom you will interview and observe throughout the term.
- In this course, you’ll aim to conduct interviews between 6 - 8 people who are not your classmates. To prepare for these interviews, you’ll first conduct some preliminary interview with two CS449/649 classmates from other teams. Before this studio session, identify at least two classmates to conduct mock ("pilot") interviews. To prepare for subsequent interviews with real people, also identify at least two non-classmates (or a general recruitment strategy) that you want to interview as you design and evaluate your course projects.
Studio Activities
To Dos (After Studio)
- Complete design notebook entry for D2: Personas
- P4: Prepare for next studio
Sources / References
For more information about the topics covered in lecture and reflected in the studio activity, see the following:
- 📖 Yvonne Rogers et al: Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (6th Edition, 2023): Chapter 8 - Data Gathering (ebook available with WatIAM login)
- 📖 Alan Cooper: The Origin of Personas, in Innovation: The Quarterly Journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (2004)
- 📖 Sarah Gibbons: Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX (2019) | Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking (2018) | Journey Mapping 101 (2018)
- 📖 How to Create a User Persona (2025)
- 📖 Personas – A Simple Introduction (2025)
- 📖 Empathy Maps: The Practical Guide to Creating 10-Minute Personas (2026)
- 📺 PlaybookUX: Creating Personas for User Experience Research (2019)
- 📖 F. S. Visser et al. Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign, 1(2) (2005).
- 📖 Interaction Design Foundation. How to Conduct User Interviews (2026).
- 📖 Stanford d.School. Empathy Interview Guide.
- 📖 Jakob Nielsen. Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000).
- 📺 Joanna Chrzanowska: Demo qualitative interview with mistakes (2014)
- 📺 Joanna Chrzanowska: Demonstration Qualitative Interview - how it should be done (2014)
- 📺 Graham R Gibbs: How to do a research interview (2013)