Challenge Activity
STAGE ONE: CREATING USER PERSONAS
After completing my affinity maps and validating my findings with further research on alternative therapies I created two distinct user personas. I did find this to be an effective exercise and I referred back to them throughout the project to keep my user’s frustrations and behaviours in mind. Having said that, I was conscious of a user persona’s ability to enhance existing stereotypes (MARSDEN and HAAG 2016). One of my classmates Aleksandra Walczak wrote a really informative blog post on the gender neutral persona she created for this module. I think as my research highlighted that women are drastically over-represented in alternative therapies with medical misogyny being one of the biggest contributors of this, it made sense in this case to include gender identity. However, it really made an impression on me and I would like to explore gender neutral personas in the future and compare their success.
STAGE TWO: USER JOURNEY
Now that I had a clear picture of my user, I thought it would be a useful exercise to map their journey through the current version of the course and identify problems and opportunities. Because of the close relationship clients of Your Inner Peace have with Amanda I knew they’d appreciate the personal touch she brings to the course. However being younger, entrepreneurial and social media savvy the cash payment, paper award and lack of social media connectivity would be frustrating.
STAGE THREE: COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I couldn’t find any other digital product dealing specifically in holistic / alternative therapy education, however, there’s a very dense market of products dealing with online learning more generally. I chose to analyse three products that I had first hand experience with. Duolingo I use to supplement my Welsh language learning and Codecademy I began using before applying to this course. Canvas is the tool used by the university to host Falmouth Flexible degree content so I also interact with that daily. This exercise helped me identify pluses and deltas in each solution and help shape my understanding of what makes an online learning product successful. Particularly when incorporating gamification, Duolingo is very feature heavy with a lot of interruptions and it incentivises people extrinsically with little emphasis on the intrinsic motivations people have to learn a language.
