⏰ Do Now — Start Here
If you had to design a poster that would appeal to "everyone in the world," what would it have to look like? Is that actually possible?
🎯 Today's Big Question
- How do professional designers research a target audience before designing anything?
📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To
- Distinguish between primary research (surveys, interviews) and secondary research (existing data, competitor analysis).
- Build a simple audience persona (a fictional "typical user") from a short data set.
- Explain why designing for 'everyone' usually means designing well for no one.
🧰 What You'll Need
- Sample survey results or a short case-study handout (teacher-provided)
- Persona template (paper or Google Doc)
📋 Your Plan for Today
Day 1: Research Methods
- Do Now (5 min).
- Mini-lesson (15 min): primary vs. secondary research, with real examples of each.
- Guided analysis (10 min): as a class, analyze one sample data set together.
- Independent/pair analysis (15 min): analyze a second sample data set in pairs.
Day 2: Building a Persona
- Do Now (5 min): what's the difference between primary and secondary research? Mini-lesson (8 min): what makes a strong persona (name, age, goals, frustrations, design preferences).
- Independent build (22 min): build a persona from the sample data.
- Present to a partner (10 min): explain what it would mean for a design aimed at that persona.
📚 Key Words
- Primary Research
- Original research you collect yourself, like a survey or interview.
- Secondary Research
- Research that already exists, like published statistics or competitor examples.
- Persona
- A fictional profile representing a real segment of an audience, used to guide design decisions.'
- Target Audience
- The specific group a design is created to reach and persuade.
✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include
Persona document scored with a rubric: grounded in the actual data provided, specific rather than generic.
Exit Ticket: Name one design decision that would change depending on which persona you were designing for.
📊 Before You Leave
Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.
🎓 ACP Exam Prep
This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry
🔗 Want to Learn More?
🚀 The Extra Mile
Cross-Class Connection: The same persona-building technique a Psychology or Sociology unit uses to study group behavior.
Career Connection: Persona research is literally chapter one of UI/UX and named directly in that career's deep-dive page.
Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:
- Build a real persona for an actual audience (your school's underclassmen, a club's target members) using real, gathered data. Start here: pick one specific person you actually know from that audience and interview them first, before you invent anyone.
- Design a short survey and run it on ten real people, then summarize what you learned as a one-page research brief. Start here: draft your questions in a plain document first and read each one aloud — if it can be answered with a shrug or "I don't know," rewrite it before you build the survey.