Product Design

Lab Session # 5

This lab is aimed to enable you to understand and observe people in their settings and consequently
comprehend their point of view. This is an important step in the human-centered design process, as
illustrated below. In this context, you are asked to develop personas of important stakeholders
corresponding to your selected design challenge.

What’s needed:

 Sample persona of Mr. Yang, an elderly living alone in Shanghai.

 Rough pages (around 5 pages)
 Laptop/mobile devices for online search

Task Setting:

This activity will also be conducted as a group activity since it requires critical analysis of the selected
persons as well as role-playing activity for presenting the pains and gains of the stake-holders. You will sit
in the same circular setting as was done in a few previous lab sessions.

Task: Build Personas of the Stakeholders

In the past lectures, you were asked to frame a few candidate design-challenges and conduct interviews
of the important stakeholders. While evaluating your proformas, it was revealed that you may need
something more to understand personality profiles (aka personas) of the stakeholders. These personas
must shed light on the life of end-users and other stakeholders; understand their hopes and desires and
comprehend their gains and pains. Therefore, this lab session has been designed to fill this gap.

But who are these stakeholders?

For the recurring example of care solution for the elderly, as discussed in the class, you can think of nurses,
doctors, close relatives of the patient/elderly, etc. But the most important stakeholder will be the elderly
person him/herself.

We have discussed this during the lecture; therefore, please refer to the relevant discussion on that. The
following figure just provides a glimpse of what we discussed.
Now, taking cues from here, you are asked to build personas of the three most important stakeholders
relevant to your selected design challenge. These personas must shed light and provide insights into the
situation where you are planning to offer a solution. Initially, you will develop these personas on your
own, but then generate these personas using ChatGPT. Once done, critically compare these and find voids,
errors, omissions, miscoceptions ,etc. to improve your work.

Deliverables:

1. Persona-1 of the End User

2. Persona-2 and 3 of the other most important stake-holders
3. Critical analysis of your personas vis-à-vis those generated using ChatGPT
4. A comprehensive report in the final lab report
Assessment Rubrics:

1. Persona-1 encapsulates the life/situation of the end-user sufficiently (i.e. understand & observe)
2. Persona-2 encapsulates the life/situation of the second stake-holder sufficiently
3. Persona-3 encapsulates the life/situation of the third stake-holder sufficiently
4. Personas contain the point-of-view of concerned stakeholders adequately
5. The connection between design challenge and personas is well-established.