One of the most important things you can do to help make your site more usable is to get to know your users. This can be done in various ways. Conducting usability tests (gorilla or more in-depth tests), soliciting user feedback, interviewing and surveying are all good ways of doing this, and there are many more. Once you get started, you will have a pretty good basis of information on your users to help you design and advocate for them.
You can further increase the usefulness of this information, as well as add to it, by creating personas for your users.
A persona is a user profile that you can use to help make design decisions, as well as use to aid you in other ways. These profiles are created from your knowledge of your users, usually knowledge gained from user testing and research. Think of it as having a “ virtual” user to bounce ideas off and help you keep the goals of the user in mind on a day-to-day basis. They are another powerful and valuable tool you can add to your toolbox.
What I’ll do here is show you a quick and easy method to help you create your personas, as well as the basics of how they can be used. This is by no means going to be the only way this can be done, nor is it the only way personas can be used. There is much more to the world of personas than I’ll be discussing here.
The more you put into your personas (and any other usability strategy) the more you’ll get out of them – I just hope to get you started. To that end I’ll give you some links to resources that will explain in much more detail how you can use, create and learn from personas when we’re done.
The first and most important thing you’ll need to do is gather information about your users. Depending on your resources and budget this can be done in various ways and to varying levels of detail. Let’s concentrate on a few simple ways that will specifically help you create personas.
One of the best ways you can get good information for your personas is by interviewing your users one on one. If you are planning on doing some usability testing, add ten minutes or so to users’ sessions and have someone sit down and ask them some questions. If you can’t get in direct contact with them, provide an survey (by email for example) for them to fill out and send to you.
It’s fairly important to get a decent sized sample of user data. What you’ll need to look for when building your personas is patterns or similarities between users. You’ll want to avoid keying in on one particular person for a persona.
Things you’ll want to find out about:
You don’t need to limit it to that, and this list should vary depending on the type of site you are building, your audiences and the business you are in. For example, I work for a children’s hospital, so when interviewing parents we asked some generic questions about their kids and their relationship with the hospital. All of that was very important when building our personas.
In addition to the interview data, you can gather some demographic type data from your server logs (technical), and by talking to stakeholders. A good group to speak with, as they will most likely have some of this, is your marketing department.
There are other ways to get information about your users that would be helpful in persona creation. Focus groups, emotional response testing, site feedback forms and surveys can all help you out.
Once you have gathered your data, and hopefully you will have enough to begin to see some patterns emerge, you’ll need to sort that data and summarize it for review. One thing you’ll want to keep in mind is to separate the patterns so that things that apply to the majority of users are not lumped in with patterns specific to single users or very few users. This way you’ll be able to identify a common or primary user base (and persona) as well as a secondary persona. More on that shortly.