As a designer, I have learned that understanding your users is crucial to creating meaningful and effective solutions. While developing the personas and user journey maps for parents, students, and professors. This process was incredibly insightful and highlighted key perspectives and challenges unique to each of the groups. The process also revealed some common thoughts. All three groups valued clear communication and a sense of community.  Furthermore, I learned the value of continuous iteration and feedback. The initial personas and journey maps were just starting points. Through ongoing dialogue with users, I was able to refine my understanding and create more accurate and relevant representations of their experiences.   

For parents, the persona work highlighted their concern about their child’s academic success, but also deeply valued their well-being and development. The user persona maps showed their frustration with complicated school communication and the desire for more personalized support. For students, the personas revealed a diverse range of motivations, from those driven by career aspirations and those who are seeking personal growth. Their persona maps exposed main points like difficulty navigating resources and the need for more engaging learning experiences. Professors, on the other hand, showed a passion for teaching. Their journey maps underscored the need for better information on the programs itself, and the need to showcase student work. All the three persona maps had similar frustrations and challenges even though the user groups are different. But they all wanted to know more in depth about what Visual Communication was essential and if it is different from Graphic Design. Also, the user groups wanted to know and see more projects from past and current students. The professor’s persona map showed that it wanted to display student work so it could give more insight to potential students on the projects they would be doing. The parents and students also needed to see active students work for the same reason the professor wants to highlight them. 

One of the biggest challenges was creating realistic scenarios for the user journey maps. It was tough to balance the need for detail and to not make things repetitive. To address this, me and my team went through our interview transcripts, refining the scenarios based on their feedback. This iterative approach improved the maps’ accuracy and helped me develop active listening skills. This process has significantly contributed to my growth as a designer. It reinforced the importance of user-centered design and the need to understand and address the needs of different user groups.