User Personas
A Persona is a imaginary user who represents many users. Alan Cooper developed the concept to improve design by allowing design decisions to focus on specific requirements rather than many possibilities.
Analysis
Types of Users
Users with mobility impairments covers a very wide range of abilities and ages. To make a broad categorization users may be:
- Adults who experience an accident or event such as a stroke, sometimes temporary
- Adults with age related degeneration
- People, especially childen, with congenital physical disabilities, who often have multiple disabilities, including learning difficulties or limited education, and often need to learn to use a switch through specialist educational programs.
Each user has unique control requirements and often relies on specialist clinical technical support to provide, select and configure their equipment. In the UK equipment tends to be expensive with funding and provision via educational or clinical public services, charities or private funding. Users often get minimal support for the equipment, partially as health staff many not be experts in the technical issues and possibilities.
User Tasks
In general devices are used to:
- Command and control. User controls the program to desired effect (e.g. selects from options).
- Text input. User enters arbitrary text.
- Communication with others. User engages in verbal or pictorial communication with others (often called Augmentative and Alternative Communication, AAC, as used by Stephen Hawking).
Image creation can be thought of as command and control due to the complexity usually needed (in comparison text is serial and can be unformated).
Sean
Sean is 32 yrs old and 3 years ago was in a car accident on the way to his work at the local newspaper's admin office. He remains paralysed from the shoulders down but with a little controlled movement in his left hand. He is able to communicate verbally and with facial expressions but relies on support for Activities of Daily Living and for mobility. A thorough assessment resulted in him being provided with a computer with internet access which he controls with a round switch under his left hand and a second head switch operated by turning his head. Before his accident he regularly used email, web and office software at work and at home and would now like to use them again. In particular he wants to surf the web, especially for news, information and to engage in on-line social activities such as email and chat. The general switch scanning program he has been given allows him to surf several web sites and operate some basic programs but there are many that just don't work. The program can be configured but there is none available to do it at the moment. He has seen an online document editing program that looks great for creating fliers for his campaign but he just can use it as it is so difficult to move navigate in the web page. He enjoys visiting the local park but as some areas are in accessible to him he wants to start a campaign to persuade the council to improve it. He would like to use him computer to asist.
