Personas & Scenarios
Personas
qualitative
How to develop personas
We develop model users and understand their likely behaviour - informing planning, strategy, design and development throughout the lifecycle of a project.
'The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the
information they have about users' goals and behaviors. When teams
have the right information, the job of designing a powerful,
intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When
they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle.
One of the most effective solutions to uncover user needs and
translate those needs into a design is Cooper's interaction design
methodology, The Goal-Directed Method.
( http://www.cooper.com/about/process/ ) With Cooper's method,
features of the design are directly related to user research through
the use of personas and scenarios.'
<mini tutorial>
GOALS have to be related to the project.
<b>GOALS</b> are about:
How does she find/get to know about the site
How and why does she go on the site?
What does she expect?
What is she trying to achieve?
How does she behave while there? etc
<b>NEEDS</b> are about:
Has she got any special needs (reading glasses, not a confident writer, short attention span because kids interfere ??)?
What will...
...help her to achieve her goals
...help her to have a good experience?
...persuade her to make one or more of our conversion goals?
...compel her to come back to the site?
Generally for a persona to work he/she will need to be succinct and his/her main needs and goals memorable - best with pictures of PETS (ideally with family as well)
and as I said before NOT as a pdf - personas need to be usable - as in copy/pastable and editable.
</persona mini tutorial>
The skill is to avoid overlap between personas and also cover most of what the site needs to consider and offer for a good user experience.
They also need to be 'backed' by real people or they are not of much help. If they are only grounded in what we 'think' people do and not what we researched (stats analysis, surveys, interviews, market research) we might as well go along without them.
for reference see: Crappy personas vs robust personas
Naming Personas:
from a IAxD contribution by Jeff Stevenson
Instead of a last name use a one or two word description of the person. For example:
- Ann the Aspiring Family Cook
- Rita the Reluctant Cook
- Patty the Passionate Cook
Personas Reference
My personas_notes.ppt doc
segmentation: White-collar, blue-collar etc wikipedia for jobs
Use Cases
Use cases, ten years later - great article on use cases by Alistair Cockburn
Scenarios
Nice article on how to use scenarios as an effective tool for describing project requirements - by James Robertson 'Step Two' - it's for CSM selection - but also holds true for web projects.
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