Research documents

We will go over some of the most used documents in the research stage. These documents will make the gathered information accessible and easy to use for the whole team, so all the different people included in the development process will benefit from them. Connecting with your users' needs is easier when you can imagine them as real people, and therefore these documents will try to create a real person in the development team's mind.

Once we have collected all possible information from our users, we will try to classify and represent our users as real people with needs and circumstances. The same application will not be used in the same way by all our users, so we have to try to understand the different contexts that affect the user experience we are designing. We will work with different types of users in our head, trying to make our solution effective for all of them.

Although these documents can work as independent documents, they work better as a whole. We will describe and give some tips about documents--personas, scenarios, and user journeys. Mapping the connection between them is a key point to understanding the motivations and circumstances that make a user interact with our system a little bit deeper.

These are the research documents we will cover in this book. They are some of the most commonly used ones by all kinds of teams:

• Persona document: We will create a fictional character for each of the user groups we target, and select or invent a set of motivations, characteristics, and circumstances that match the general characteristics of the group it represents. We will work with this character as a reference for our design tasks, with the aim that our designs meet the needs of the members of the group.
• Scenario: In each scenario, we will find a different set of circumstances and motivations that will affect the user experience of our character when using our application. The level of detail may vary according to the needs of the project. You can simply tell why the character uses the application and when, or you can detail each step and interaction of the character with the app, from the beginning until the final task or set of tasks.
• User Journey: The User Journey document is mainly focused on the interactions, feelings, and thoughts that the user has while doing a specific task. As in the scenario, the level of detail can be different on each project. While in some stages of product development it could be enough working with the main steps and interactions, we should give information about all the aspects that can modify the user experience in other stages. In this document, we can also study all the possible alternative scenarios that can occur when the task moves away from the most usual scenario.