How can you design personas for smart cities in UX research?

What are personas? Personas is the embodiment of the prominent characteristics of your target audience. This would include things like a bio, motivations, pain point, age, sex, education or even hobbies. What gets added here should add value to the problem/hypothesis you are tackling. The goal here is to help your team and others (eg. stakeholders), to empathise with the user in delivering solutions that would work for them. You can use personas as guard rails in product specifications to deliver solutions that would be a precise painkiller to the issue that the persona is facing.

Why are personas important for smart cities? Cities are the environment most people spend their time interacting in. In the pursuit of technological improvement in different mediums (eg. lift/ vending machine) provides us with a better and safer experience, we might neglect certain groups of people in the society. For example, in Singapore there are an increasing amount of automated kiosks to order food. Which provides tremendous operational efficiency gains compared to physical labour. It alienates the elderly whom are not familiar with technology. This is where personas helps to guide us in developing a city that provides accessibility for all groups of people, enhancing their quality of life.

How to design personas for smart cities? There are multiple approaches to gather requirements to build this. At the start of any research, it's probably best practice to define the scope of your research. Followed by the users of your solution, which could be built on an assumption. The next question I would ask myself, is the present alternative based on my hypothesis/ solution that the group of users are presently using. If it's a physical product in a physical location (eg. lift), head to the site to gather your information. If it's a web or mobile app, try asking for access to the data. Common characteristics to note for smart cities: - Age - Sex - Traffic/ How often people use it - Why are they using it Summarise and group them

Designing personas for smart cities involves understanding diverse urban inhabitants. Start with demographic research, considering age, occupation, and lifestyle. Then, delve into psychographics, analyzing behaviors, needs, and tech proficiency. Identify segments: tech-savvy professionals, elderly residents, families, etc. Create personas, like 'Tech-Forward Urbanite' or 'Elderly Resident,' detailing their goals, pain points, and interactions with city services. Consider their preferences for smart solutions: mobile apps, IoT devices, or AI-driven services. Incorporate real-world data and user insights to ensure personas reflect the city's diverse populace, guiding the design of user-centric smart city solutions.

After you collected, summarised, categorised your observation/ survey into personas use it to guide your design decisions and considerations in building your solution. Let's take building a lift for this use case. In your research you learnt that in this neighbourhood, most people who uses the lift in the location are children and old folks whom are wheelchair bounded. Developing user stories, user journeys, or storyboards to illustrate user interactions helps to add design considerations would be added, such as. - Height and size of lift buttons to visibility and reach - Prominent sounds to alert closing of lift doors - Rails and ramps to and in the lift for accessibility - Safety mechanisms on lift doors for children.

Personas are never static, through prototyping, simulation with users, your understanding of the problem space gets better. Environments and people change, I would recommend to follow up with your target users through interviews, surveys or focus group to keep pace with the ever evolving pace of technological improvements. Armed with new insights, it provides space to enhance and improve your solution, and update your personas.