Digital and web advice from Headscape and the addled brain of Paul Boag... tell me more
Despite what the title imply, I am actually a fan of user personas. There are good reasons why user personas have become an important deliverable among branding and web agencies alike. User personas are an invaluable tool when working on a site’s visual appearance. User personas are an invaluable tool when working on a site’s visual appearance, and it would be wrong not to cover them in this series. However, I have written about pe…
I was asked recently to research and prepare a set of user personas for a large new client website. As a newcomer to the wonderful world of ‘User Experience’ design,this was an interesting challenge and I thought I would share my findings with the lovely people in the land of Boag. What is a user persona? So what on Earth IS a persona? Well, a web persona is a stereotype, or archetype of a typical website user. For getting to grips w…
…r whatever than it is actually in the actually putting pixels on the page. I’d be interesting in what other things you do before you get to the design stage, you’ve said you use mood boards, what about things like personas what business background information do you tray and get before you start? Do you get people to personify there company and describe what kind of person it would be, ya know all the kind of techniques that people us…
I am a visual person, so when I’m working on a site I find it incredibly useful to picture the person I’m designing for. That is where personas come in. They make the user real and that to me is invaluable. That said, some personas can get a bit wordy for me. They go into so much depth about the persons likes and dislikes, their internet experience and family situation, that they loose their impact. They stop being an easy way to kee…
…ngs. People have been not so thrilled about this technique recently, saying that it kind of, um, is not, it doesn’t produce natural reactions from users, but that is one kind of technique. There is, uh, kind of creating personas, and using personas, user personas which are an archetype of your site or product’s users, and getting everyone involved in activities around those personas, whether that be using those personas as your talkin…
…d a persona Unsurprisingly, to build an accurate persona can be a time consuming and expensive process. However in web design where the budgets do not compare with the world of advertising there are ways of ensuring that your personas are as accurate as possible without breaking the bank. Some methods might include: Speak to those within the organisation who have contact with end users Talk to friends and family, see if you can find anybody who…
…ersona for its own sake. The aim is to create a tool that can be used to define the character of your site. This will in turn inform the design and content. I would be interested to hear whether you have considered using site personas before and if so what your expeirences has been? I would also like to know what problems you see with this approach. This is very much an area where my thinking is evolving so please provide feedback in the comments…
…rds based solution to the problem called @font-face, which is certainly good news. However, until IE and Firefox follow suit this is still not going to get a lot of traction. We will have to wait and see. Creating better user personas I feel like I have been talking about user personas a lot recently. They are certainly a tool I have been using for a long time and with good reason. I find them incredibly useful in focusing the designer and client…
…do on the website is relatively limited. This is not unusual and is perhaps why an increasing number of web designers are focusing on the goals, activities and tasks rather than the demographics of the user. The problem with personas For a while now the web design community (myself included) have put a considerable emphasis on personas as a way to design for the user’s needs. Personas do have their place. Being able to picture what a user looks…
When you last redesigned your website, did you create user personas? The chances are you did. User personas have become a massively popular way to better understand your users. But, what about understanding yourself? What about understanding your business? Aaron Walters produced a great post about understanding your own site’s personality for Smashing Magazine. Among other things he wrote: Personas show us only half of what we need to see…