User Personae/Journey Maps - March 20, 2018

We had a project due on 3/13 where we created user personae and journey maps to present in class. The weather, however, closed Emerson for the day and we waited a week to present them. This was an interesting exercise in identifying the communities within which we were conducting research for our thesis projects. I had already done some of the interviews and this project required me to take a step back from the research and consider the strata of my community and the answers they were giving me to the questions I asked. For my project, I'm not interrogating my community to reveal deep research insights, rather I'm probing them to see what they know and how they feel about the data transactions they make every day. In some cases -- in particular with the younger (college age) people I've spoken to -- there is an awareness of the deal they make with social media, shopping, IoT and other connected businesses for data use but have not yet considered the long-term potential for abuse. The next strata (25-45 year olds) have long had data relationships with internet-based corporations and developers and are wary of the possibility that their data may be used without their best interests in mind. Finally, the older generation still operate in a world that straddles the analog and digital divides and they are very aware of the trust problems that come with investing too much of their identity and privacy to internet companies. Some of these community members point to the Equifax and Yahoo! breaches and, currently, the Facebook/Russia link and Cambridge Analytica to illustrate their skepticism. Some have been direct victims of identity fraud and would prefer to keep much of their private data to themselves. 

In terms of how these subjects saw some of the concepts of data asset allocation being forwarded in the real world, the discussion was varied and interesting. In the case of Daniel, a community member who had recently relocated to the US from the United Kingdom, he was concerned about the fragility and lack of depth to the existing American social safety net. He had always had access to an expanded safety net with higher education and health care as two pillars of those benefits and was surprised at the approach to these systems here. For some of the older cohort, there was a wariness of tax increases and a cynicism that any solution would actually be able to reduce their tax burden. 

The journey map I designed was intended to be the clearest path to the goal of opening up dialog about the broader perspectives of data ownership, valuation and privacy with respect to using this asset toward a model for the public good. This journey map reflects similar journeys for audiences with other social impact films such as An Inconvenient Truth and Blackfish. While my project has none of the cachet that those projects had, the goal is still the same.