Using Personas to Improve User Experience
- 1. February 27, 2013 Using Personas to Improve your User Experience
- 2. February 27, 2013 Hi! ! My Name is Boriss I’m on the Mozilla User Experience Team
- 3. February 27, 2013 Our focus is on how Mozilla’s products and services are perceived, learned, and used
- 4. February 27, 2013 tl;dr: User experience is a back and forth process between: 1. The needs of users 2. Innovation based on those needs
- 5. February 27, 2013 If only the users’ current needs are considered... ! “We ask users what they want and we’ll build that.”
- 6. February 27, 2013 Ask users what they want and then build it? Cool, let’s do that! except....
- 7. This only addresses current problems, so your solutions will be limited to current problems
- 8. Users are experts in what bothers them, but not why it bothers them nor what the solution is !
- 9. “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” ! - attributed to Henry Ford, but who knows
- 10. Can lead to just “averaging” needs: building to fix individual problems rather than with an overall vision of the product !
- 11. February 27, 2013 Grey “What’s your favorite color?”
- 12. February 27, 2013 Ok, so how do we build products real user needs?
- 13. February 27, 2013 First, know your users. • What are they trying to accomplish? ! • What are their metrics of success? Productivity, creativity, accomplishment, better communication, fun? ! • Oh, and... who are they?
- 14. February 27, 2013 A common problem app developers face is unknowingly designing for: • Their features and capabilities • Themselves • Everyone • Their mom
- 15. February 27, 2013 To avoid falling in this trap, create a persona! ! Personas are fictional, archetypal users that represent the needs of larger groups of users
- 16. February 27, 2013 To avoid falling in this trap, create a persona! ! They act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design
- 17. February 27, 2013 ! Personas have specific attributes as people and needs as users. They should be “real” enough to talk about and design for !
- 18. February 27, 2013 Personas are useful for: ! Giving the team a shared point of reference for design (much better than everyone’s mom)
- 19. February 27, 2013 Personas are useful for: ! Tying the usage and design of the product to real human needs, not just features
- 20. February 27, 2013 Personas are useful for: ! Focusing the scope of design on particular kinds of users, rather than “all users”