Week 5 Tutorial: Demographics, Psychographics and Personas

During this tutorial we looked at the importance of targeting our user precisely. I originally started with my target audience to be students who live far away from univetsity, or people who are unable to make friends in university. Since my website idea allows students to group together and discuss assignments online, which would ideally form it's own community as it looks like a majority of students would use it. However to actually be encouraged to participate within the website, this requires the student to be motivated enough about their work. Now to zone in on a particular target audience I am focusing on students who want to succeed in university, but they lack the connections to discuss ideas or share queries with.

We were told to design a persona who would use or product. After attempting this activity, it helped me to brainstorm the situations where my website would help solve the problems of the users. I tried to focus on the details that prevented students from participating in the community that UC already has. One example being students not being able to establish a strong enough connection with classmates to further talk outside of classes, this leaves them with no one to talk with as moodle's forum is seen as too serious to discuss little things.

The question of 'will it just be another Facebook?' Came up from the tutorial. To answer this my website will help to filter out all the unmotivated students, leaving only motivated students discussing, sharing, ideas and insights. Leading to a stronger community rather than just making a Facebook group around an  assignment. Also I need to figure out what type of problems online students experience, in order to further improve my website and distinguish it from regular forums.

Bibliography:

Marinersoftware.com,. (2015). Retrieved 18 March 2015, from https://marinersoftware.com/media/images/products/persona/persona-all.png