The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web

The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (Voices That Matter) Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar why user-centered design is important, what personas are, and how they make Web sites more successful.

A step-by-step guide to creating personas.

Using personas for all types of decision-making,

Keep your personas alive within your organization, making them an explicit part of your everyday process for creating or improving the site.

Persona are particularly useful for making user research come to life.

information architecture, the craft of organizing features and content so that users can find what they need.

The second component is interaction design—the complementary craft of helping users actually do what they need to do in order to accomplish their goals.

A persona is a realistic character sketch representing one segment of a Web site’s targeted audience.

Personas summarize user research findings and bring that research to life in such a way that a company can make decisions based on these personas, not based on themselves.

First and foremost, personas are grounded in research.

primarily defined by the goals they have when they come to the site, personas are also defined by their behaviors and attitudes

Instead of talking generally about “users,” you can talk about precisely which people you want to target.

Personas bring the team together to create one shared vision of exactly whom you’re designing for and what they want.

It can be extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of personas, because they make up one tool among many that you can use to improve Web sites.

having a tool to enable you to focus on the needs of real people can only help bring focus to the work you do.

1. Qualitative personas
2. Qualitative personas with quantitative validation
3. Quantitative personas

You do research to better understand your users, but exactly what is it that you want to find out about them?

its answer dictates which research methods you should use,

Qualitative research is about discovering new things with a small sample size.

A small number of users (10–20) to get new ideas or uncover previously unknown issues.

Qulitative research doesn’t prove anything,

It uncovers insights that you can then test or prove.

Quantitative research is about testing or proving something with a large sample size.

With hundreds or thousands of data points to analyze, you can look for statistically significant trends test a hypothesis you uncover with qualitative research.

Quantitative research is better at telling you what is happening

Qualitative research is better at telling you why it’s happening

Qualitative research is an inexpensive

What people say isn’t necessarily what they do.

many people aren’t very good at analyzing their own behavior or at paying attention to their actions.

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Qualitative Personas

User interviews

Some companies conduct field studies instead, where they observe users in their native environment

Segmentation is the art of taking many data points and creating groupings that can be described

Based on commonalities among each group’s members.

Each type of user evolves into a persona as you add more detail to their goals, behaviors, and attitudes.

Pros:

Relatively low effort is required.

Costs are minimal

Simpler persona stories increase understanding and buy-in.

Simplicity breeds clarity, which stakeholders can more easily grasp and act upon.

Fewer specialized skill sets are necessary and you don’t need any statistical analysis skills