We’ve talked before about some of the UX methods we use, and our mantra “design for the user”, but two very important questions we need to ask are, “Who exactly are our users?” and “How do we get teams to look at the site structure and information from a user’s perspective?”.
The answer (at least for us), is...
Personas
We create personas for our UX workshops, and they can be a very useful tool for getting staff from the service area we're working with to think about the people who are actually going to visit the site.
This is often a very necessary and beneficial part of our planning process, because of the mindset we often encounter when we first start to work with a service area. They’re so familiar with their information, how the team or department is structured, and how this has previously been mirrored on the website that navigating it has become second nature. It can take quite a leap in thinking for them to realise that not everything is as simple and intuitive for the customer as it could, and really should, be. It’s often assumed that we’ll basically be replicating their old site, maybe with a bit more flexibility, a new design and a few more features (the old “lipstick on a pig”).
Our own input can help provide a slightly different perspective as, obviously, we’re not experts in all areas of council operations and services, and more importantly, as most of us live in Shropshire we’re also customers. We tend to ask lots of (possibly silly) questions about how everything currently works when we first get together to kick off the project because, after all, if we as council employees don’t understand why something is done in a certain way, what hope is there for a member of the public?
The next step, during a workshop, and usually following on from a card-sorting activity, is getting the team to draw up a potential site structure (the fun bit with all the paper, pens, glue and sticky notes). We then give out a couple of personas and ask them to consider how a particular individual might fare when trying to find something on their newly drawn-up site – this can prove to be a bit of an eye-opener!
The intention of this exercise is to help the participants see that the customer doesn’t care (harsh but true!) where a particular team sits within the structure of the department and how they categorise their work, nor should they be forced to learn in order to find the information they’re seeking.
We do use other methods when trying to get an initial information structure and site map drawn up, but in terms of getting our services “inside the customers head”, personas are incredibly useful!
So, how do we come up with the personas we use?
There are loads of resources on the internet to help guide you in creating personas, (you can have a look at some of my favourite templates on the Project WIP Pinterest board UX/UI – it’s all in the detail for inspiration). Most of the templates cover the same types of information, a photo, profile/bio, likes and dislikes, technology expertise and devices, and relationship with the council (or company). Ideally you need to do a bit of research and decide what types of information you'll need in order to create a selection of potential customer personas.
Your persona template must be visually nice and clear, and should have enough detail for a workshop participant to be able to put themselves in the person’s shoes, without being so long winded that they get bogged down reading a full life story. They need to be able to see the information at a glance, so definitely no more than one page!
Once you have your layout, the next job is to fill it with information about your customer. The easiest way to do this would be to just make it up – after all, it’s an imaginary person – however, this wouldn’t really give you a solid basis on which to create a brilliant user experience for real people. For your persona to be as relevant as possible you need to profile who your customers/visitors are (or are likely to be) – for example, a teenager and a person in their sixties are unlikely to share similar attributes in terms of what devices they use to access the internet, or their general level of comfort with technology, but both may be looking to find information on housing benefits.
Some of the things you can refer to when profiling your user, in order to develop a great persona, include: analytics and site statistics, information from the team or department regarding their customers, and user research and surveys (there’s a good infographic here: http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/ showing various data sources you might want to use).
As well as using analytics etc, I try and think of people I know who live in Shropshire. This may not be the most scientific way of approaching it, but my family and friends who live here are all Shropshire Council customers, and therefore are examples of the kind of people who might be looking at the site.
Another, less anecdotal, tool we have available to help us profile the residents of Shropshire is the Mosaic customer segmentation portal. The portal uses information from a wide variety of sources to give you valuable customer insight about your specific area. This has proved to be a great resource for coming up with personas that represent our residents, it has lots of detail about Shropshire demographics, including information about age groups, income bands and technology use, and shows how reliant a group of people are likely to be on the council, and their preferred method of contact.
We have found that using these methods and spending some time and effort getting personas right is definitely worth it.
To sum up...
No persona can ever take the place of research with real users, of course, but bringing personas into a project early in the planning stages of a website can prove to be a great way of demonstrating where there are potential problems and why things might need to be done differently, as well as emphasising the importance of user-centric design to the service/client you are working with.