Having completed my user interviews, I now wanted to make a set of user personas for the project. To do this, I initially used ChatGPT, then embellished the personas with information from my user interviews and the testimonials from my user research.
In Week 03 - Design & Strategy, I looked at the idea of a Persona Spectrum and how personas should be removed from being real people, rather than being generalisations of multiple people. Ideally, I would have interviewed enough people to make personas that way, but being in uni with time constraints meant the best way to do this was to start with AI as a broad look at my users, then add to it with my first-hand information. This worked really well and I can see how if I had just used my interviews to create personas it would have been too specific to one person.
I created three personas; the first was someone with dementia who lived alone/had help from family; the second was someone who had early dementia and was being cared for by a spouse; and the third was someone caring for someone with dementia. I chose to do the 2/1 split on user types because the people with dementia were the more varied and unknown users to me; I could understand and relate more to the carer, as their part in this project would most likely take the form of a dashboard-type app, while the people with dementia would need a more bespoke solution.
After creating my user personas, I then created a series of empathy maps. These were lighter touch than my user personas and reflected my user more as real people rather than a list of wants and needs. I found this useful as it helped me to contextualise the content in my user personas and make it more focussed into how actual real people would feel about the issue.
