Putting personas to work

How to ensure they live beyond the initial enthusiasm and interest

Neil Allison University Website Programme

Web Publishers Community, February 2014

Overview

1. What’s a persona?

2. Bringing personas to life: Activities, tips, experiences

3. Why persona projects fail

Questions?

1. What’s a persona?• Personas are essentially made-up people

– Reflecting key traits and attitudes

• They help personalise a large, diverse group

• They’re typically based on: – Data generated by user research

– Knowledge of a customer base or user group

Personas bring focus

The User Is Always Right

by Steve Mulder

http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

Personas build empathy

The User Is Always Right

by Steve Mulder

http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

Personas encourage consensus

The User Is Always Right

by Steve Mulder

http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

Personas bring efficiencies

The User Is Always Right

by Steve Mulder

http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

Summary: why use personas?

• Better shared understanding of users’ behaviour, attitudes and needs

• Better communication across development & support teams

– “What would Olive use this feature for?”

– “Would Terry understand this guidance?”

• Building a shared vision of who we’re working for and why

Our experience

• 2008 – Prospective student & parent investigation with SRA & International Office

• 2009 – First version of Polopoly user personas

• 2010 – Prospective PG online UX project

• 2011 – PG project phase 2 with schools

• 2013 – CMS user personas for Drupal project

• 2013/4 – New arrival UG and prospective visiting students for Student Experience Project

CMS user personas

How the University Website Programme represents you

Olive the occasional user

• Wants to avoid web publishing tasks where possible.

• No engagement with support and community; doesn’t see herself as a web-publisher. Feels the only help is her colleagues.

• Reactive – only edits when unavoidable.

• Little or no confidence in web publishing.

• Just wants to dump content into CMS as initially drafted.

Technical

Time for publishing

Frequent user of CMS

Non-technical

No time for publishing

Infrequent user of CMS

“It all seemed quite straightforward at the training session…”

Basic edits to existing content Adding new pages with basic elements to

existing structures

TYP

ICA

L TA

SKS

Every time she needs to perform a task in the CMS, it feels like learning how to do it from scratchPA

INP

OIN

TS

More colleagues publishing webpages, so more people to ask for help (or to pass the work on to!)B

ENEF

ITO

F C

MS

If at all!

Ed the everyday editor

• Wants to complete publishing tasks as quickly and easily as possible

• May engage with community events if prompted. Uses support wiki but prefers email or phone.

• Mainly reactive – directed by others.

• Confident with day-to-day web publishing activities.

• CMS structure is good because it makes it harder to break things.

Technical

Time for publishing

Frequent user of CMS

Non-technical

No time for publishing

Infrequent user of CMS

Creates and edits web-pages Simple reorganisation of subsections Takes on new features when prompted,

but needs support to implement

TYP

ICA

L TA

SKS

Needs basic editorial tasks to be quick and hassle-free

Needs to consult support wiki for tasks he doesn’t do frequently

PAIN

PO

INTS

Likes having a support service available; gives him more confidence in web publishing.

Feels his web pages look professional.

BEN

EFIT

OF

CM

S

“I just want to get the job done quickly”

Coleen the comms specialist

• Wants to help her unit meet their goals by providing a professional and efficient suite of communication channels, which includes the website

• Engages with web publishing community. Tries out new features independently

• Proactive – Web is part of communications and improving it will support business.

• Confidence in range of relevant CMS functionality.

• Wants CMS to deliver more flexible webpage layouts

Technical

Time for publishing

Frequent user of CMS

Non-technical

No time for publishing

Infrequent user of CMS

“The website needs to keep pace with the business & its users”

Directly manages high profile content Manages site focus and structure Dictates who edits & publishesTY

PIC

AL

TASK

S

Pace of improvements to the system are slow

Wants CMS to keep pace with trends in web comms and user behaviour

PAIN

PO

INTS

Can do more advanced web publishing without technical input.

Training and support means she’s more confident about the quality of her team’s work

Can share and use others’ content

BEN

EFIT

OF

CM

S

Terry the tech specialist

• Wants to try new things, innovate, collaborate.

• Engages with the Technical Peer Group and Web Publishers Community when there are topics of interest.

• Mainly proactive. Keeps abreast of technical trends and internal issues.

• Confident in range of web technology.

• Wants to modify the CMS to meet needs of his unit & to experiment.

Technical

Time for publishing

Frequent user of CMS

Non-technical

No time for publishing

Infrequent user of CMS

“Central services hold back innovation & improve too slowly”

One-off projects covering all areas of web-development and integration

Emergency publishing Fixing others’ problems

TYP

ICA

L TA

SKS

Feels restricted by corporate CMS Wants to be able to customise locally Wants more direct access to CMSPA

INP

OIN

TS

Gets to spend less time doing basic web-publishing tasks

BEN

EFIT

OF

CM

S

Which persona are you?

• Spend a moment to reflect…

• Individual users are (almost) always represented by multiple personas

– What percentage of each are you?

– What aspects do you most associate with?

2. Bringing personas to life

Familiarisation exercises, Research,Reporting, Planning & prioritising

Stakeholder buy-in

• Get stakeholders involved in creation

• Limit the number of personas

• Make them distinct and memorable

• Allow time for familiarisation

Familiarisation exercises

• A way to think about and discuss the personas

• Does everyone feel the personas would react in the same way in a particular scenario?

How do we know we’re doing it properly?

When you find yourself saying:– “I doubt Ed would ever want to do that”

And no one asks:– “Who’s Ed?”

We’re probably getting there

Behavioural matrices

Low tech High tech

Infr

equ

en

t C

MS

use

Fre

que

nt C

MS

use

No CMS community

engagement

High community

engagementR

ea

ctive

co

nte

nt m

gt

Pro

active

co

nte

nt m

gt

• Map the four personas to each matrix• Compare locations with the group

– Any significant differences of opinion?

New CMS service goals• B - Facilitate online business for all areas of the University

• R - Be robust, resilient and scalable

• I - Support flexible and innovative web development

• D - A quality website user experience across multiple devices

• G - Be governed and managed by a central service withinclusive, transparent processes

• E - Quick and easy for all levels of CMS user

• S - Support the generation of standards- and legislation-compliant websites

Which goal is most important to each persona?

Amazon reviews• Choose one persona

• Write a review for

– Polopoly

– The new CMS

Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk by Go Office

Genuine product & reviews: bit.ly/amazon-wheelmate

Usability testing

• Recruit participants to play role of personas

or

• Use persona to steer real user recruitment

Competitor analysis

• Compare competitor provision with the objective yardstick of a persona

Expressing your findings

• Map out persona experiences

• Immediate and succinct way to report research findings

cxpartners.com

uxmatters.com

Scorecards for ongoing monitoring

Sample scorecard from ‘Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead’ by Lou Rosenfeld http://bit.ly/Hwjdoc

Objectively and regularly measure

Tell a story

• Easy to do with senior stakeholders

• Easy to collaborate on

• Storytelling is an ancient and universal activity

Persona-weighted feature prioritisation

New students site content

Persona 1 Persona 2 Persona 3 …

Checklists

Welcome guides

Money & fees

Etc…

Step 1: Score the feature:• 2 – Persona will love this• 1 – Sure, it’s fine. Expected• 0 – Doesn’t affect the persona• -1 – Persona will hate this

Step 2: Editorial discussion:• What do we need to do to the

feature to meet persona expectations?

• Is this feature adding value?

• Can be used for functionality, services and content

• For existing stuff & potential new developments

• Weight personas if some are more important than others

The CMS…

Expressing different requirements

…provides functionality to create accessible web forms to collect data fromvisitors

…can email collected form data …or stores & allows viewing of visitor entered data securely & in

accordance with data protection legislation

I want data to be collected and viewed easily so that our processes can be improved.I don’t want my site compromised.

I want enough functionality to enable me to create forms for a variety of uses without the need for technical help.I don’t want to have to deal with spam data.

Coleen

Ed TerryI want data to be stored centrally so that I don’t need to build and maintain external systems.

This is important to me because…Olive

• We believe that

– Creating this content

• For

– This persona

• Will achieve

– This outcome

• We will know when we are successful

– When we see...

Challenge new development ideas

3. So why do personas fail?

• Stakeholders don’t understand

• Personas don’t feel real

• Personas get avoided or forgotten

“Essence of a Successful Persona Project”

Jared Spool found the most important aspects were:

– Internalizing the personas

– Creating rich scenarios

– Prioritizing the most important personas

– Involving all the stakeholders and influencers

bit.ly/uie-successful-personas

The final resting place of many personas

Flickr creative commons credits:Pindec

Vegansoldier

Our personas LIVE!

Want to learn more?

• See the wiki www.bit.ly/edinburgh-personas

• Training session coming soon – interested?

Thank you

Questions?