Researching how different companies use personas to gauge who may or may not be their audience made me think differently about the website I am creating and who might be a user. According to Shlomo Goltz, in his article “A Closer Look at Personas: What They Are and How They Work,” states, “A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way . . . Each persona represents a significant portion of people in the real world and enables the designer to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters, instead of focusing on thousands of individuals.” (Goltz, “A Closer Look at Personas). According to Goltz, personas are a way for someone to narrow down and focus on the different traits of people rather than a generalized public. Before looking at personas, while I thought I was narrowing my primary and secondary audiences down to more descriptive characteristics, I was not looking at the bigger picture. For example, for my project, I stated that my primary audience includes everyday American tourists of national parks or memorials with at least a high school education. However, that was not as narrow as I thought. After reading about personas, I did not consider why people visit these places, what they might have been interested in school, or their degrees. I also did not consider the people who necessarily do not visit these places. According to the WOSP Personas, some people visit, occasionally visit, or do not visit at all. Different audiences should be considered when designing a project to incorporate ways that might make them users. (WOSP Personas).

The Pew Research Center’s research on internet, mobile, and social media use has also made me reconsider who and what my focus is on. According to the Center, mobile use plays a big part in peoples’ everyday lives. The Center states, “Mobile devices have changed the way people think about how and when they can communicate and gather information by making just-in-time and real-time encounters possible. They have also affected the way people allocate their time and attention.” (Pew Research Center, “Three Technology Revolutions”). The last line made me think about how I need to design my project to make it a website for people who want to “allocate their time and attention.” According to the Pew Research Center, social media use has risen in the past years, stating, “The rise of social media and social networking has affected the way that people think about their friends, acquaintances, and even strangers . . . One of the major impacts was that the traditional boundaries between private and public, between home and work, between being a consumer of information and producer of it were blurred.” (Pew Research Center, “Three Technology Revolutions). Again, the last part struck me. For my project, I plan on making the website collaborative. With this new information from the Center, I see that social media can be used for people to be a “producer” of information for the project.