DUE Thursday, Feb 16 – 4 points
(Friday NOON deadline)

In addition to the second chapter of Website Owner’s Manual, we will be discussing the following items:

• Please Start From The Beginning: Paul Boag
  An interview with Paul Boag (the author of our textbook) about what he does today and how he got his start in web design.

• Data Driven Design Research Personas (Slides 1-25, 34-40)
  A set of slides from a presentation about creating personas. Be sure to look at the persona of “Joe Jones” on slide 25.

• “Sara Locke”
  An example persona created by D. Keith Robinson, author of Practical Persona Creation.

• Redesigning the Stop sign
  A popular video parodying the client–designer/consultant relationship. (Pay particular notice to the project’s target audience.)

Once you have watched or listened to or read these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you the full 3 points.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author / speaker / interviewee …”:

1. T/F? Paul Boag’s title at the time of the video was “Web Strategist”.
2. T/F? Paul Boag’s T-shirt references the popular social networking site Facebook.
3. T/F? Paul Boag’s first web-related job was as a code monkey.
4. T/F? Paul believes that Headscape and Boagworld both are ill-considered names and domains from a branding perspective.
5. T/F? Paul wrote his dissertation at university on virtual communities.
6. T/F? Paul connects his interest in public speaking to his growing up going to church.
7. T/F? Paul’s one piece of advice to others: Accept who you are, find what works for you, and play to your strengths.
8. T/F? The purpose of a persona is to help guide you in making decisions about such things as interaction and visual design.
9. T/F? Good personas represent the “average user.”
10. T/F? Getting data for personas from multiple sources (such as internal stakeholders and external users) helps keep things balanced.
11. T/F? You should not base a persona on someone you actually know.
12. T/F? “Joe Jones” is a commercial airline pilot who just started a college fund for his newborn baby.
13. T/F? The persona for “Joe Jones” includes information about how much he uses the internet.
14. T/F? One common mistake is creating a set of personas that is too small.
15. T/F? One common mistake is leaving out too much personal information from your personas.
16. T/F? One common mistake is failing to use the personas you created throughout the entire project.
17. T/F? D. Keith Robinson did not include a picture of “Sara Locke” in his persona.
18. T/F? The persona for “Sara Locke” includes information about how much she uses the internet.
19. T/F? The client for the new stop sign is “targeting women, but also targeting men, secondarily.”
20. T/F? The first design created by the consultant for the new stop was a red octagon, but the final product was half green and half yellow.

DUE Thursday, Feb 16 – 4 points
(Friday NOON deadline)