I really enjoyed this post from Fantasy Interactive’s UX director Irene Pereyra.
She talks about 10 steps that help create an engaging user experience.
4. Forget about Nancy, think user types
Personas are vital when it comes to structuring the content. Look at all the content holistically and think about what people are trying to accomplish. Doing this helps prioritise the content and allows the site to be structured around the user’s goals. But traditional personas – “Nancy, who is 28-35 years old, drives an economy car, has a four-year-old PC she primarily uses for email, earns between $30K-$50K a year and wants to comparison shop for a cheap airfare to visit her mother in Florida” – won’t offer much insight into the user’s actual behaviour.
Instead, group basic User Types into categories according to what they want to do on the site such as “browsing,” “comparison shopping,” “killing time,” “looking for specific content.” These groupings will provide you with much more useful insights about why users come to sites or applications, the context of use (where and how), what content they’re seeking and how much time they have. In turn, you’ll be better equipped to design the website or application around their behaviour patterns, thus making their fictional names, ages, professions and income levels irrelevant.
Number four is spot on…a persona is just data, not knowledge and certainly not a path to action. We always need to create a scaffold for the data to make sense…but more importantly, I enjoy highlighting the dynamic tension *between* user types. Even a crap-tastic diagram like the one below can help us have a really important conversation – what types of actions are we going to enable? How to we manage the tension between single and multi-functional needs? Maybe I just like diagrams, but I feel like we always have to make the leap from Personas to Persona-archetypes…and then to a diagram that shows how these archetypes relate or oppose each other.
Then, like in any good story, we can find a way to relieve the dynamic tension between these types.
