AT: Personas + empathy mapping

In order to give my design a user base, I constructed several personas that provided a broad spread of the stakeholders I'd determined in earlier brainstorming sessions. At this stage, I hadn't done user interviews which are normally a prerequisite of the persona design thinking method. Instead I'd based them off of my observations, knowledge gathering and roleplaying. The personas I formed were also written with a basic scenario in mind to give the user a context, and included an empathy map. My four personas covered a female regular commuter, a female occasional commuter from a foreign country, a Dominion Road store owner, and a male occasional commuter. These four personas cover the most realistic range of users.

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My personas included:

Kathryn Harper, a 23 year old nurse at Greenlane Medical Centre. She frequently commutes to and from her work place and her parents house near the far end of Dominion Road. The area has next to no foot traffic as it is far from the restaurants that act as Dominion Roads main drawcard, and has scant lighting. There is no parking at her work as it is all allocated to the doctors and patients, and flats nearby are way out of her price range, so she shall be living with her parents, and commuting via Dominion Road for the forseeable future.

Requirements:

- Bus service on schedule

- Cleanliness

- Lighting for security

- Visibility so she isn't driven past by the bus

James Franklin is a 27 year old accountant living and working on the North Shore. Despite having much of his disposable income being taken up by ongoing renovations on the house he shares with his girlfriends, he manages to get some downtime by going on fishing trips or the odd lads night out with his high school friends. They often hit the cheap Chinese restaurants along Dominion Road, getting suitably inebriated before heading to bars closer to town.

Despite living within a half hour walk or 10 minute bike ride to work, he chooses to drive. Rarely does he consider public transport as he's convinced its dirty, unreliable, and for those of a lesser income. On the other hand, taxi's are expensive given his current financial situation, and he's not going to drive to and from Dominion Road / town boozed, nor will his girlfriend pick him up come 2am. He is a reluctant public transport patron.

Requirements:

- Cleanliness

- Reliability

- Visibility of bus stops

Chloe Baguette is a 19 year old foreign exchange student from Paris, France. She lives and studies in downtown Auckland. Studying hard during the week, she spends her weekends and the odd weeknight getting around Aucklands various tourist hotspots via public transport, which she is finding far inferior to that of her home town of Paris. Language is definitely a barrier for her, so she tends to ask for directions and for information about the buses, a subject which most people are completely alien to. The lack of signage and complicated timetables serve to further frustrate her efforts. Having heard of Dominion Road through a classmate, shes keen to check it out, but will be doing so alone, as everyone else has plans. She wonders if its safe, as some parts of Auckland she has already seen are quite dark and a bit run down.

Requirements:

- Lighting for safety

- Visibility

- Intuitive wayfinding

- Reliability

My final persona is of Prindravhar Hatal, a 30 year old man running an Indian restaurant on Dominion Road. After being handed the keys to the restaurant after his fathers retirement, Prindravhar has been working long hours to support his young family, as well as trying to aid his short staffed kitchen team due to an unusually high worker turnover in recent months. To add to his stresses, he's heard that AT is going to get rid of the street parking that he feels is hugely important to his customers. He feels like his opinion hasn't been sought, and that he's getting the short end of the stick. He finds it frustrating that there is so much importance being placed on buses....after all they only attract drunks and the poor! Anyone worth knowing drives a car! And all these louts are going to be right outside his restaurant, waiting for a bus and scaring off his customers!

Requirements:

- Clean public transport facilities

- Car parks for his customers

- Security

From these personas, I was able to take into account the different user groups or stakeholders and their needs and requirements, and begin picking out common themes from these.