Posts Tagged ‘design’
How to make an effective usability persona
Personae (or personas if you prefer) are an important part of a user centered design process, and one of the key ways in which usability experts can communicate their findings. I’m going to look at how to make a persona, and what the advantages are to you, and the design team
How to make a Persona
We’re going to assume you’ve already take some steps towards understanding the users. You could have designed a survey, or performed one on one interviews, and now you have a pretty good understanding of who your users are, and what they think about your product.
First we need to divide the people into demographics. Did all the women over 50 find your game idea too violent? Did most of the children think it sounded like it would get dull? Try to focus on the key areas where people picked up on things, and ignore the outliers for now – you want to turn all your results into 3-5 personae, of which only one or two will be the ‘key’ users you are designing for.
Now you want to write about these groups you’ve divided the people into. Make them real people; give them names, occupations and a back story. Make their name an in-joke, that’ll make you laugh, but no-one else will ever get (Hello Bibi Andersson). Include some text about how they’d use the product, and what they’d expect from it. Also include some concerns that they may have. You want these people to be treated as real people, and so they need to be complete! Include a picture, so that people can see the people they are designing for.
pictures make everything more fun
Why you should be making personae
There are many advantages to making usability and user experience personae. As a usability expert, it can help you by:
- Communicating your findings in a way that will be read (unlike that big 50 page report)
- Can be stuck on the wall, keeping your role in the team prominent
- Allowing you to make a definitive impact on the design of the product
- Incorporating usability and user experience principles from the start of the design process, promoting the use of your field as a holistic practice, rather than a ‘last stage’ of product development.
not that sort of persona
Why they need you to make personae
You obviously don’t just make personae for your own benefit. The design team benefits in many ways from your deliverable as well. Not only does it give them an easy way to understand your findings, and focuses on the aspects that are important in their roles, but it gives them a concrete person, or group of people, to design for.
A persona gives an important baseline for future developments by the design team. By understanding who they are designing for, it reduces coder’s natural urge to spend too long designing for the ‘edge case’ users, and focuses their attention on the core functionality required (perhaps an example of how to maximise with the 80/20 rule ). This reduces feature creep, as the team can consider whether the personae identified would actually use the new suggested features, and as such helps deliver games and projects on time, and to budget. I’m guessing that 3D realms did not use personae.
Happy New Decade
Welcome to 2010, hope everyone had a great holiday.
Straight back onto UX issues -
For my HCI Coursework, I’m designing a new product, with a focus on evaluating the user requirements -
To do this, I’ve made a survey (keeping in mind the issues I raised on making a UX Survey), to help me understand user’s needs.
It’d make my decade if you’d fill out the survey, it only takes 2-3 minutes and doesnt require any personal details
Feel free to comment here aswell, if you find any issues with the survey itself.
I have lots of ideas for UX blog posts for 2010, so expect alot more to come soon…
Steve
Introduction to Human Computer Interaction
The first lecture from Dr Graham Mcallister ( http://altclick.wordpress.com/ ) introduced us to the key aims of usability, and not just in the field of computing. Essentially, it is the art of design from a user’s perspective – and the most basic user at that. It is not enough to make software that is functional, if no-one can use it. Even usability issues that you would consider minor will dissuade people from using your product, whether it is an online shop, a ticket machine, or a computer game (as leisure activities, the success of games are particularly reliant on a positive user experience). Sam Nixon ( http://www.samuelnixon.com/ ) has shared an article which highlights the importance of good usability design, where altering just one button an a high traffic website had an immediate effect on sales – ( The $300 million button)
A less adept user
A software engineer is unlikely to be best placed to consider usability issues – they are too close to the code, and have a deep understanding of how it works. As such it can be difficult to distance themselves from their knowledge, and try the system as a new user, or one who is less adept with technology. It is therefore the job of a usability expert, using tools such as ‘voice aloud’ playtesting, and user interview to assess the usability of a system, and target aspects that need particular revision.
It is important to start usability testing early on in the development process of a product, and continue it throughout the lifecycle of a project. Catching issues early on will make them easier to fix than having to redesign major sections of the project at a late stage, and ignoring them altogether will may make the entire project redundant, such as with the Pocketmail
The Pocketmail is an example of a product that went all the way to market without obviously thinking about what the users want, and how they want to use it. It gave the ability to send and receive email from a handheld device, pretty impressive for the year 2000, even if it wouldn’t fit in your pocket. The only downside being that to send and receive mail, you’d have to hold it up to a land line telephone. Oh. Surely then, you’d call the person you need to contact? Or text them? SMS was widely used by then.
But back to the HCI course. The topic seems really interesting, and something I’m genuinely interested in. As a smug iPhone user (and former employee of a Mac computer store), I’ve seen the results of year of usability refinement, and it’s a field that is both really interesting, and that has a huge amount of room to expand into. It affects every user’s experience of a product, and can be the deciding factor in whether a product succeeds, or fails miserably. Within the course we are getting the opportunity to work with the university, and a real client on delivering usability solutions, and I am really excited about this opportunity. I’m currently reading Game Usability by Katherine Isbister & Noel Schaffer – its seems a useful introduction to the field, although its authority does seem a bit diminished by the author misspelling his name, and that he seems to interview his dad.. hmm! I’ve also signed up for the UPA. Can’t wait for my new ‘designing the user experience’ poster to come through the post!
We’ve been asked to bring in examples of good and bad design for next week. The only bad example that springs to mind is craiglist – does it really need to give all that screen real estate to a list of cities/countries that a user won’t use after their first visit? Craig Newman is famously resistant to change though, so its too easy of an example (no Web 2.0 here!)
