Two Users the Design Refused to Average
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 🏷️ Status | Complete |
| 📅 Project | Hwang Yoo-Yup · Digital Legacy Platform |
| 🚩 Phase | Define |
| 🧩 Input | 7 research themes · 4 interviews · competitive gap |
| 📦 Output | 2 evidence-based personas · POV → HMW → feature matrix · dual-mode journey map · project goals & success-metrics framework |
Discover proved the two user modes were real. Define made the decision that shaped everything after it: design for the distance between those modes rather than averaging them into a single user who would have served neither.
Two personas anchor the phase, and neither is invented — both are clustered directly from interview data. Maya Chen (Discovery) synthesizes the gallery dealer and the artist: visual-first, theme-led, emotion before context. Dr. Samuel Ortiz (Research) synthesizes the art advisor and the museum director: evidence-first, structure-led, credibility before exploration.
From there, each research insight was carried through a POV → How-Might-We → design-strategy → feature chain, so every build decision traces back to a stated user need. A journey map mapped each persona’s emotional and informational arc, and a project-goals and success-metrics framework set what the platform had to achieve and how it would be judged.
The two personas. Maya needs to feel the work first, then understand it; Samuel needs the evidence that the legacy is historically grounded. The cross-persona analysis resolved every major design question as both/and rather than either/or — the homepage delivers a positioning statement and hero artwork simultaneously; context is progressively disclosed and structurally available from the start; navigation works by theme and by period.
From insight to feature. The POV → HMW matrix produced eleven mapped responses across Maya, Samuel, and shared needs. Three decisions were singled out for their research lineage: the Motifs interpretation system (recurring imagery explained, not tagged), the dual-navigation architecture (“Explore the Work” vs. “Start with the Story,” switchable at any point), and the editorial voice guide (reflective, precise, never promotional — tone treated as credibility infrastructure).
The defining principle. A single composite persona would have produced a design that served neither audience. Designing for the space between Maya and Samuel — rather than collapsing them — is what produced the dual-navigation architecture that became the platform’s defining structural feature.
[PLACEHOLDER — two-persona comparison + journey map swimlanes]