Reflective Journaling: Week 7

How are we already at week 7? The final week! I had an absolute blast making the persona design this week. I really felt like everything that I learned throughout this course was able to be showcased in this final assignment.  Creating this persona is something that I attempted to do with the workflow assignment, but this persona assignment allowed me to use a lot more of my design skills. I had so much fun creating the layout and playing around with the look and feel of the overall design.

I must admit, even with a graphic design background, I have never been a huge fan of using grids to design with, but I was also up for challenging myself and pushing myself outside of my comfort zone when creating this persona layout. The grid actually helped quite a bit while I was trying to accomplish the most aesthetically pleasing asymmetrical layout which made me kick myself a bit. I have always been so “oh I am just going to do this by eye” a real go-with-the-flow designer, but just like all of my graphic design professors told me, the grid is my friend.

In addition to creating this persona layout, I also researched and read quite a few articles about how to create the best personas, how to set up a persona, and why they are so important to design and research of a product. I learned a lot about the intricacies about designing for a prototypical individual and opened my eyes further to how important it is to not let my biased or what I think the user would want, get in the way of making a great product and keeping my user happy.