Our new website has gone live for Webnographer, the remote usability testing tool that we have developed. We spent some time working on the Information Architecture of the site with Danny Hope, of UX Brighton fame.
The challenge we faced, which is common for many sites, is that our audience has many levels of knowledge both about Usability, and Remote Usability. Information Architecture is critical for any website, that is getting the conceptual structure and logical organization of the site right.
So, how did we go about it?
We put the user at the heart of our design. This is usually done in the world of usability and information architecture through reasearch and creating personas. These personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site.
There are many heated discussions to be found on the subject on the IxDA mailing list, with many different arguments for and against personas.
Here is our take on it. We don’t use them. Instead, we use real people! The important thing is that you think about your user, a person. Not a target market, that is a non-tangible thing. Thinking about a real person helps build empaphy, helps focus your design process, and lets you design better products. Personas help encourage this. But they take time to create as they are fictional creations of a user type. Real people work just as well, and even better, because you don’t have to imagine whether they would like something, as you can just give them a call and ask them.
The process of using real people
When we started designing the website, the first step was to map out the target audience that we had identified to date. As you can see on the picture of the white board, we broke our user base down by the industry sector they worked in (see picture of white board). For example in our case: In-house UX specialists, Agencies, and Usability Professionals, Developers, etc. Then we picked people who were representative for the culture of a sector, put their names on the board. (To protect their identity I have smudged out their names.) We know these representative users, as we have met them and keep meeting them throughout the concurrent ethnographic research that we are carying out.
The hard part in the exercise was to identify what are peoples motivations and feelings. This is always hard as people have varied backgrounds, knowledge and views. Even people in the same sector have different mental models. Using real people to motivate the design, meant that if we where unsure about their motivation, all it took was a phone call, or meet up with them to find out.
Once we had our hypothesis of peoples motivations, we then could start creating the structure of the site and different message for communication. As you can see on the photo on the left the design started taking place, and the design for our website evolved.
So, are we finished?
No. We work agile and want to keep improving our site. People and technology will keep changing, and so too will the Webnographer website. Also, we are aware that some of the language used on the site is still geeky, and needs to be “translated” into non-geek language. This is something we are working on at the moment. Also we are very keen on getting feedback from our users, so if there is anything you like, dislike, or fell is missing, please feel free to leave you comments here. We are listening!
We would like to thank Danny for all the enlightenment in structuring the ideas and the insight that he gave us. Just look at our old holding page above and compare that to our new website. Its a great improvement!
James,
Good post, thanks.
One big objection though – you keep saying that personas are fictional, as though we just make them up. This is a comment that we hear a lot from people who question the value of personas (often because they don’t want to pay for the work of creating them).
I would argue that personas are not fictional. When done right, they arise from a rigorous process of research and analysis, and they are authentic representations of real people. Which is a way of saying they may be “fictional” in the sense that they are not living, breathing people. But they are not imaginary. We don’t just make them up.
To my mind, there *is* a discussion to be had about the value of direct engagement with real people versus engagement with real people mediated by personas. But I don’t feel we can have that discussion seriously on the basis of a false distinction between “real” people and “fictional” personas.
Just my 2c worth, as ever.
I think David’s got it right. In our most recent project, we had many interview subjects with their own peculiar tastes. In one case, we spoke to a fellow who had written his own RSS reader in Python. If we focused on him, we would have missed the fact that most other people in his role hadn’t even heard of RSS.
The process of developing personas helped us identify the commonalities between members of our target audiences and deemphasize the fluke data. The personas themselves served as an approachable, memorable representation of pages of transcripts, notes, and survey results.
Great discussion.
If one could truly full and real time data on user movements through your website. One could move beyond personas toward a true user driven design.
It’s also important to acquire a representative focus group for some live testing of user experience.
@david in no way was I meaning to be derogatorily about Personas being fictional. Most fiction comes alive in the imagination of the reader. Often fiction like the Old Man and the Sea is based on true stories. This article explains the background to how Hemingway developed the story.
Just like good believable fiction, that sets the imagination on fire, personas take time to develop. Finding the time is hard in an Agile environment like ours.
The advantage of not using Persona is that it becomes very easy to validate the research, and justify its value. This is because one can test the assumptions made. In our case everyone we used as a representative users, has gone on to use Webnographer. The next stage is to swap who we use as representative users, and then can test our assumptions again.
@Jonathan I agree that one has to be careful in picking the representative users, and not the edge cases. It is also important to make sure that the panel is large enough that one can cross validate the assumptions between participants.
The process differs from Persona creation in that our whole process is concurrent, and we are validating all the time. We create both negative and positive hypothesis, which we constantly test. That would be another blog post.
James, Thanks for your replies.
My point about personas being “fictional” was not that it was derogatory, just that you appear to fall into the familiar and unhelpful trap of arguing that personas are imaginary, to justify not using them. I don’t think that’s a good reason not to use them, but I do think there may be other reasons, and I’d like to hear those in more detail.
I would really like to read that next blog post about how you triangulate your validation process. Tell us more!