- Personas: putting a face on your research data
- Content strategy: what information are your personas looking for?
- Workshop: make a content map and draft the copy of your site
What is emerging from your research (competitor analysis, interviews and online surveys) so far?
Discuss your key insights with your team for 5 minutes, then tell everyone else (1 minute per team).
Personas are fictional characters based on real data from user research.
They allow you to visualise users with common behavioural patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, etc.
By building personas you can better understand and talk about your types of users.
To set a common understanding of the user(s) we're designing for.
When you work on a product, instead of talking about a generic elastic user you can talk about Chris or Harry.
As a design tool personas are used to answer key questions that will inform design decisions:
- What would Ali do in this situation?
- What would she need now?
- Does Taylor understand this?
You'll see how team discussions will be much more focused when you use personas, rather than a vague elastic user.
In order to be a useful design tool personas should challenge your design decisions, not simply validate them.
- Behaviours, what users do
- Attitudes, what users expect
- Motivations, what users want / need
- Limitations, what blocks them from doing what they want / need
Choosing relevant dimensions is the trickiest part of creating useful personas (more on this in the example below).
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Location and other typical demographics (quantifiable characteristics of a given population, such as nationality, religion and ethnicity)
In order to answer the above questions usefully and help you make effective design decisions, here are some dos and don'ts to keep in mind when building personas.
+ Do base your personas on real data: people that you know or have interviewed / surveyed.
+ Do rather go for the extreme cases, and the middle will take care of itself. For example: design for children that can't read well yet, or for children that are not familiar with the internet, etc.
+ Do base your personas on needs, goals, and dimensions that have a direct impact on their interaction with the product you're designing.
+ Do focus on causality: what are the reasons your personas behave in a certain way? What drives them in their choices?
- Don't make your personas entirely fictional. Your product is going to be used by real people, not fairytale characters that unquestioningly adopt it and happily use it ever after.
- Don't make your personas perfectly match the ideal user of the product you're designing. I call these delusional personas.
Personas should challenge your design decisions, not simply mirror them.
- Don't create user personas in your own image. It's easy (and tempting) to create personas who are in their early 20s, living in London and studying design or working in a creative agency in Shoreditch... but there's life beyond our homophilic bubbles.
- Don't oversimplify your personas: real people are complex, not shallow and generic.
- Don't worry about demographic detail: just enough to help us get to know this persona. For example Ben, 46, father of a girl and a primary school teacher
With your team: create three personas that represent your target audience, using Xtensio.
Make sure you pick meaningful dimensions (not just the standard Xtensio template).
60 minutesto make your personas30 minutesto present your work-in-progress to everyone else
30 minutes
Discuss with your team the questions below and write down your notes in a GDoc (share it with everyone in Slack).
-
How do your personas represent your target audience(s)?
Just to make sure we haven't missed out the obvious bit.
-
What information are your personas looking for?
Make a list of information people are looking for, in order of perceived importance (based on your research, ie interviews and surveys, and on your own experience).
-
What language do your personas respond to?
In other words, how can you dress that information so that it's appealing to your audience? Write down some ideas or examples.
By now you should have an idea of who your target users are and what they want from the website you're designing.
The next steps in the process are:
- map your content
- draft the copy of your site
We'll start both these steps today, but by no means they will be finished after the first attempt.
A solid design process is based on iterations:
- You come up with an idea (for content, for a layout, for a campaign etc.)
- Prototype it
- Test it with a bunch of people
- With the results from your test, go back to the drawing board and refine (or scrap) your idea. And repeat!
60 minutes
Start mapping out your content on post-its and arrange them on a large sheet of paper.
Don't worry about interfaces and layout for now.
As you map your content, you can think of clustering sets of post-its into pages.
60 minutes
Create a GDoc (name it as YOUR_TEAM - content strategy where YOUR_TEAM is the name of your team) and share it with everyone on Slack (make sure Anyone with the link can at least comment).
With your personas and content map in mind, draft the copy of your site.
Next week we'll test your first draft (read out loud) between us.
Keep working on your website's copy with your team. Next week we'll test your first draft (read out loud) between us.
Design patterns are a way to describe solutions to common challenges.
GoodUI is an excellent resource for UI (User Interface) patterns.
Each team will research one pattern.
- Explain how that pattern works and why.
- Show a few examples of the pattern in action. Both good and bad examples.
- To make your mini-lesson interactive and memorable, ask questions to the rest of the class. For instance, you can ask people:
- if they agree/disagree with a statement
- guess a fact/figure before you reveal the answer
- how they feel about an example you are showing them
| Who | What |
|---|---|
| Rosie & Afsara | Social proof |
| Tom & Francisco | Telling who it's for |
| Rajeev & Kaleshe | Selling benefits |
| Ajay & Will | Loss aversion |
| Josh & Mark | Icon labels |
| Darren & Malore | Natural language |
| Akvile & Ben | Authenticity |
| Dean & Melissa | Putting others first |
| Jennifer & Joe & Shajee | Concise copy |
Blog about how your personas reflect what you learned from your research (interviews and online survey).