Usability & UX Articles from Nielsen Norman Group. Usability & UX Articles from Nielsen Norman Group. Roger Beynon - Predictive Personas (1/7) You are about to embark on a major site redesign.
Your team has come up with a raft of ideas, covering everything from exotic product simulators to a new color palette. How do you evaluate the ideas? You can’t afford to poll users as each new idea emerges. You typically need to dig more deeply into user reaction than simple feature ranking exercises allow. You certainly have neither the time nor the budget to explore every idea. Let’s assume your team’s list of ideas includes a mobile-optimized version of your site. If you don’t have well-developed personas, answering questions like these becomes a crap-shoot, an exercise in advanced guessing, which is the same as an exercise in regular guessing.
The persona responses below, however, demonstrate how you can answer these types of questions definitively IF you have a set of well-researched, diligently crafted personas. Roger Beynon - The Mental Model(2/7) Mental models can mean different things to different people.
Within the context of persona development, we use the term “mental model” to describe a cause-and-effect sequence that is essentially mechanical (predictable) in its operation. The mental model we use is derived from the work of psychologist Albert Ellis. He pioneered a clinical approach that began as Rational Emotive Therapy and is known these days as Rational Cognitive Behavior Therapy.
It sounds very complicated. But it is not. Roger Beynon – The Research (3 of 7) Personas are as strong or as brittle as the research from which they emerge.
As the graphic shows, we utilize, when we can, five categories of data. You may have neither the time nor the budget to explore them all. The point is simply that “eureka!” Insights can emerge from anywhere, so it is worth investigating as many data sources as you can efficiently sift. Existing research: Our clients tend to be Fortune 500 companies, which typically means there is an abundance of existing, primary research. Roger Beynon – Multi-viewpoint Deliverables (Post 4 of 7) If you have ever taken a class on fiction writing, you know that the first discipline is that of understanding viewpoint and the need to stay in it.
Persona development benefits from similar rules. We describe each persona in a set from three viewpoints: 1. a third party view; 2. the first-person voice of the persona; 3. the persona as seen through the eyes of the site owners. Each viewpoint paints a different picture and provides additional context. The combination should provide a rich, intimate, multi-dimensional portrait — an avatar. Roger Beynon – Applying the Mental Model to Design Decisions (5 of 7) Training in the mental model and its application to design decisions leverages the persona investment and maximizes its value, not only for the website but across all digital touch points.
Training is often the most challenging part of the process, since it is rarely included in the conventional (read Forrester) approach to persona development. It is, however, the most rewarding part of the process and, when executed effectively, delivers the greatest payback. Since the training ties everything together for the design team, it is best conducted as immersive, experiential learning.
The event should be run by a qualified facilitator. Roger Beynon – Persona Maintenance (Post 6 of 7) Consider, for a moment, how your own attitudes or behaviors may have changed over the past several years.
How do you regard travel to Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean these days? Would you still consider Greece a feasible holiday destination? What are your views on the environment or global warming? How do you view nuclear power after Fukashima? Have your views on investment strategy changed? Have your views of politicians gotten better or worse? Do you see the world differently as a result of discoveries in quantum physics? Have any of these attitudinal changes led you to modify your behavior or even to adopt new behaviors? The point, of course, is that our opinions, our attitudes, our operating beliefs change as the world around us changes. It is therefore advisable to build a maintenance routine into the persona development process.
The most obvious is to run some sort of visitor intercept survey continuously. These are not just new or different behaviors. Roger Beynon – Customizing your Personas for the Sales Team (7 of 7) The persona series to this point focused on personas built specifically for website design teams.
True, they can be utilized by teams from other functions (customer service, advertising, lead-gen, content producers), but the needs of those other teams often dictate an additional or alternate phase. This is particularly the case with sales teams. Our customers tend to be large corporations, so their sales people typically operate in territories and are less likely to be found in single-location clusters. This makes the training component of the persona process more difficult – often impossible — to coordinate. And while workers in most corporate disciplines these days operate under the stresses of deadlines and performance goals, the stress on sales people is typically higher (often much higher) than that in other functions. Figure 1: Design inspiration is readily available Content dictates format.