How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better - Part I

— Published February 28th, 2006  |  by John Wood   |  2 Comments

This is the first of two articles in which I’ll be making the business case for using personas and scenarios to improve your website. I’ll give you a flavour of what’s involved in using the personas and scenarios and provide a few examples of the kinds of problems we’ve solved for our clients using these techniques. In this first article, we’ll look at the core concepts of personas, leaving scenarios until next month.

What problems do personas solve?

Few organisations have any clear idea of who their users are or how they behave. We see this problem manifest in many different ways in client organisations:

• Blissful ignorance: some teams have no idea who their users are. They take direction from management and assume that’s good enough. The inevitable result is a website designed for the management or web team’s needs, not for their users.
• Casting the net too wide: Many teams decide that their users are the general public, in other words every conceivable user. But trying to design for everyone is like designing for no one, with the result that nobody is particularly well served.
• Drowning in data: Some organisations diligently collect everything they can relating to users: market segmentation data, web traffic data, survey results and so on. But they find themselves drowning in data, unsure which facts should influence their design in what way.

In all of these situations, the result is a lack of clear direction in design, shifting requirements, and a catalogue of usability, accessibility and information architecture problems that are easy to avoid. Some clients are aware that their attitude towards users may be a problem, but most often the cause of these problems remains a mystery or is misdiagnosed. The good news is that personas and scenarios can resolve this lack of clarity quickly and for very little effort.

Where do personas come from?

Techniques like personas have been around in marketing and advertising for quite a while. They were first introduced into application and web design by interaction design guru Alan Cooper in his seminal book “The inmates are running the asylum”. In that book, Cooper provided a number of case studies that illustrated the benefits of using the technique, but frustratingly he did not show us how to create personas. We had to wait until he published “About Face 2.0: Essentials of interaction design” to learn how the technique is applied by Cooper and his team.

What do personas look like?

Personas are represented as fictional people, usually getting names and photos to bring them to life. Typically the set of personas represent the different types of users of your website, and this cast of characters are the people you build the website for.

The advantages of presenting personas in this way is that the format aids communication. Presenting user profile data as lists or forms makes it harder to absorb. But everyone on your team has the ability to relate to other people, or representations of people in this case. This format helps ensure that everyone on the team knows who they are building a website for and removes the areas of doubt and uncertainty that lead to a damaging lack of clarity.

What are personas based on?

Each persona represents a distinct and important pattern of user behaviour that has been observed on your website. For example, a persona might represent those people you see in your web traffic analysis who go straight to the advanced search page from the home page, and navigate your content that way. Knowing there are users out there who behave this way gives you a solid basis for making design decisions to support them.

People coming to personas for the first time often take a while to really get their head around this idea, and may confuse personas with:

• job roles in the business process
• user roles in their IT systems
• actual people they know

Personas are none of these things. If an ageing grandmother and a 22 year old web developer both go to the advanced search from the home page, they can be represented by the same persona for the purpose of design. All other characteristics are invisible to us through the medium of the web, all we can see are patterns of behaviour, so that should be the distinguishing characteristic that segments our audience.

Where does persona data come from?

As far as possible, personas should be built on data about real users. This can include:

• web traffic data
• the results of user tests
• observation of users in their own work environment

Second hand data about users is also useful, for example information provided by your support staff or sales staff who have direct experience of your users. In fact, at first, this may be the only data you have time to incorporate into your personas. The risk is that your second-hand data paints a distorted picture of your real users, but it’s better to have an incorrect picture that you can improve over time than none at all.

So what are the benefits of using personas?

So how do personas resolve the problems we listed above? First, anyone living in blissful ignorance will enjoy having a model of their users and user behaviours for the first time. That’s a huge step forward. Second, those who cast their nets too wide find that although the general public is a huge and diverse body of people, they display very few distinct patterns of behaviour on the website. This will enable them to take a more considered approach to design. Third and finally, people drowning in data will have a way to sort the wheat from the chaff for the first time – any data that represents user behaviour is useful, everything else is much less so.

Having delivered many sets of personas to sceptical clients, I can testify to the transformative effect this technique has on their approach to their website. For the first time, people know who they are designing for and how to serve their needs, and that clarity works wonders on the quality of the end result.