What are we hoping to accomplish?
Align with a goal
Task
- What needs to be done
- The technical skills of the maker
- How it can be accomplished
- Avoid unnecessary overuse of cognitive load
Who
- Personas, all variations
- Personas are strata. They are not intended to be robust or nuanced, but a reminder that there are people-not-you on the flip side of a use. Personas, just like people, are prone to change and periodically should be relensed. Personas can be helpful in contextualization, but as a strata are prone to developing outliers.
Try your best to approach this with humility, including not taking on your source’s certainty. Think about the cognitive load (yes, again).
Constraints
- The task, people, and constraints
- The data: enough to do the task without hitting TMI
- Time: what time can be spent now, compared to known project recalibrations, compared to the likely lifespan of the material.
- And focus on the whys
The rollup categories are based on first- and third-person watching over decades; take it with a sea of salt. I have found tendrils in the psychology of perception and cognitive psychology, and many hypothesis in various UX frameworks.
accomplish:
story, strata, time
story, strata, time