From the Dogbox

I just got my first taste of real market research this past week. I attended a whole series of Focus Group sessions, peering from behind a two-way mirror, recording what our prospective clients where saying. I found myself trying to build a mental picture about what their motivations, needs and goals were with an aim to incorporate this into the new web portal I’m working on.

In business we tend to lose perspective on who’s ‘needs’ we’re actually building our business models on. It’s easy to talk about “user needs” and “clients” when you substitute your own needs into the equation.

As the strategists race ahead with the Quantitative and Qualitative research I realized that there was a huge opportunity for me explore yet another avenue of the great world of User Centered Design.

So what can I do?

Persona development jumped out as a perfect deliverable that I could add to the marketing and development mix. I’ve heard Jeff Parks, from the IA Podcast, speak at length about this technique but never had the opportunity to try my hand at any of it.

So what are personas?

Well, basically – it’s the practice of creating characters that represent your users/consumers. They could be totally fictional or even based on people you know. The key criteria are that these characters should fit the profile of your target user group. It’s also critical that you incorporate these personas into all the documentation and brainstorming session you engage in. These characters must follow the business around, leaving them in your drawer or on a document server makes this exercise pointless.

A sample of one of Todd Warfel’s persona diagrams.

I really like the work that Todd Warfel’s doing on personas. I really recommend checking out his blog (search for personas) – http://toddwarfel.com/. You can also find slides of presentations he did at the recent IA summit on Slideshare.net

Why personas?

The worst thing one can do is build something that you think is “cool” – especially if you don’t fit the profile of your user base. Creating personas and incorporating them into your deliverables helps keep your initiatives true and focused on the target audience.

How to persona?

I found it hard to get a step-by-step guide on creating personas. Boxes and Arrows and all the other UX blogs I frequent have detailed information but there’s no step-by-step quick fix. It seems that a lot of it comes down to your “gut feel” backed up by your understanding of the data you gather during the research phase.

I haven’t progressed beyond the research yet. I’m currently exploring as many documents and samples I can find. I came up with a little action plan based on my preliminary research – and that’s what I’m going to share with you in this blog post. I hope to post feedback as I go along and then measure my final deliverable against this action plan.

I sat down drew out the following steps on a whiteboard –

My whiteboard process deciphered,

1 – Discovery document

I’m waiting for the final outcome of the research phase. I plan to create a Discovery Document which will contain my interpretation of the research -

• Extract all the product dependant information.
• Identify patterns for each of the user groups.
• Convert these patterns into specific product related business goals.

Dan Brown introduces a nice matrix plotting user categories against specific patterns (Goals) in his book Communicating Design. This diagram basically highlights to what extent a specific user group needs a corresponding system goal satisfied.

2 – Group em!

From the document above I should be able to group certain needs together and start to get an idea of what I need to build. I don’t have that data yet but I’m hopeful that it will ultimately guide me through the next few steps. I’m sure it’s not going to be totally encompassing and that’s where “gut feel” and input from stakeholders will play a defining role.

I don’t want to go overboard and hope to build about 5 personas in total. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to have at least, create:

• 3 Primary personas
  Important to business and product success.
• 1 Secondary persona
  Power users or users who cost a lot in support.
• 1 Complimentary persona
  A person who might have a radically different need for which the system might not cater for in the first phase of the project.

I took these persona groupings from Christina Wodtke’s book, Information Architecture – Blueprints for the web.

3 – Give them life

The next step will be to flesh them out – Dan Brown has three layers of detail and it’s up to you to decide how far you want to take it. In my case I’ll try to take it as far as possible but time and stakeholder input will dictate the process as well.

• Layer 1 – Bare Minimum:
  - Real name and role name (Pessimist, optimist etc).
  - Motivations and needs (taken from me discovery document).
  - Scenarios (possible actions between user and the web site).

• Layer 2 – Further Detail:
  - System Features in relation to the persona.
  - Behaviors (Bridge that gap between Motivations and Features).
  - Quote (something the user will say – direct dependence on product/feature set).

• Layer 3 – Persona in the Flesh
  - Demographic information.
  - Technology – comfort level of persona.
  - Personal background (not too detailed).
  - Photograph.

…that’s my plan of action. I will post updates when and if possible. Some these elements are of a sensitive nature so I might have to tone my research deliverables down a little.

Warning:
This is just my take on the process based on my personal research. I might be totally missing the mark here. I can’t share all my data but will try to create at least one persona that I can post here on my blog to see if my ‘process’ succeeded in creating a workable document.

More Reading:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas
• http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html
• http://toddwarfel.com/archives/category/personas/
• http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/everything-and-the