Personas

GD3990A fall 2014 · GW Corcoran School of the Arts and Design
Instructor: David Ramos (davidramos@email.gwu.edu)

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Personas created by the class.

Isabella

• 38 years old, visiting from São Paulo, Brazil
• Lawyer
• In D.C. for five days as a tourist, traveling with her three children (six months, four years, and 14 years old). Married – meeting her husband tomorrow.
• Native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese. Fluent in Spanish. Took one semester of English in school and forgot most of it. Knows enough to be polite in commercial transactions and little more.
• Uses several credit cards, and has no US cash on her at the moment.
• Owns two smartphones (personal and work, both Android), a work laptop that she brings home, and a Kindle. Confident and experienced with technology. Her relatives go to her for help.
• Has never been to D.C.
• Would buy a SmarTrip card but would resent it slightly
• Impatient

Joe

• 68 years old
• Lives in the Virginia suburbs, a driving trip to Metro
• Retired, veteran, former auto mechanic
• Married; two children and two grandchildren.
• Uses a wheelchair. (Can drive a car equipped with a lift and hand controls but finds it increasingly difficult in the city.)
• Travels on Metro about twice a year; no SmarTrip card
• Has one credit card, but prefers to use cash.
• Owns a desktop computer, which he uses for Word (writing memoirs), email (Gmail, set up by his adult daughter), no social media. Has a landline and also a featurephone. Patient but quickly frustrated.

Emily

• 19 years old
• From Hawaii
• Attends GW; sophomore chemistry major
• First member of her family to go to college
• Single
• Lives with an aunt in Silver Spring, Md., and can walk to the Metro station there
• Works part-time at a coffeeshop on H St. NE (can travel by bus or by Metro, depending on schedules and costs)
• Rides every day, uses SmarTrip, sometimes with travel passes
• Has one credit card, rarely carries cash, and money is tight
• Owns a small netbook and a two-year-old Android phone (only uses for voice, text, web, and the Facebook app)
• Capable of performing her routine tasks on a computer but is not interested in technology; has a habit of clicking “OK” without reading

Photo credits

Images by Ryan Johnson, kris krüg, and Carlos Reis on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.