We have outlined in detail our goals and incentives, and especially mentioned our focus on the user, so now it is reasonable to prepare persona portraits to encapsulate our typical audience representatives.

In any platform development and design, it is necessary to think about who, how and why will use your product. Taking into account habits, wishes, concerns of our personas will drive the design vision and functionality of our app. We take into consideration the ‘use activity’ in order to compile our development requirements.

Behind our user interface is the understanding of real-life interfaces to support the process of traveling. We believe in a niche targeted approach so that best suitable scenarios fit a prefixed user group of a certain type.

In their academic research Viana G., Robert JM. (2016) give a definition for personas: they “are “hypothetical archetypes of actual users through which designers can develop a precise description of [the] user and what he wishes to accomplish”. In their paper, they conclude that building personas is helpful for designers to visualise and summarise functionalities and features of a product that is to be developed. Although, they note that it should be done in conjunction with real user usability testing. That said, our persona portraits represent a concentrated view from different angles of our potential users.

Our personas were generated from the thorough review of forums and related social networks followed by classification and critical analysis.

First, we brainstormed persona types and came up with three portraits: an undergraduate first-year student (18-22), a mature student (22-25) and a commercial partner. Our user experience team talked to representatives of these user groups (at university, book stores) acquiring tons of data and identifying motivations, worries, past experience, characteristics, and needs.

Second, our team collectively gathered, sorted out, systemised and classified all the data to produce objective portraits with a rich description of each persona.

Here are the results:

We hope that such user-centric design will elevate our product value to the highest level.

All images are used under CC license.