Posts Tagged ‘ux reports’
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.
How to present a UX Report
This week I’ve been working on producing a UX report for an iPhone game, and have been thinking about the best method to present your findings to a client. A UX report needs to consider the client’s needs. They are likely to be busy, and are most interested in your findings, with your methodology and data as a secondary concern. Because of this, should the results be bumped up to one of the first pages? I’m giving this a go, but would be interested to discover if it’s better than a chronological approach (i.e. summary, methodology, data, results and conclusion).
There are many methods you could use to present your findings to a client, below is a brief summary of three popular methods, noting a few advantages and disadvantages.
A Paper UX Report
This would be a (hopefully not too large) document, including all of your study divided into sections. It could also integrate graphs, pictures etc.
Advantages
- Can cover every aspect of the process in depth (and have specific sections for different audiences, i.e. programmers, artists)
- Can be given to a client remotely
- Can be duplicated easily for multiple recipients
Disadvantages
- Clients may skip sections
- Have to describe problems with text
- Harder to highlight the key issues
A Video UX Report
preferably 3d. Or Imax
A video report may be a useful way of demonstrating issues, as it would be possible to directly show the problems. Using ‘chapters’ in a DVD also means you can present multiple aspects of your process separately, such as the summary and the individual issues.
Advantages
- Easy to demonstrate UX issues visually
- Can ensure client gets shown the important parts
- Can be presented in an exciting method
Disadvantages
- Takes a long time to produce
- Harder for clients to ‘skip back’ to specific issues
- Likely to need to be supplemented by a ‘take away’ document
Presenting a UX report
Presenting to a client can ensure they understand the points you are conveying, and means you can ensure that they are paying attention (rather than skipping some pages in your paper report). It does however mean you have to be physically present, which can be difficult based on your geographic location.
Advantages
- Can ensure that the key points are communicated
- Can directly take and respond to issues from the client
- Can be supplemented with interactive aspects.
Disadvantages
- Have to be physically present with the client
- Likely to need to be supplemented by a ‘take away’ document.
Of course you could combine more than one, or use all of these methods to present your data. For the report I’m producing, I think it has to be paper, as the client is in another country, making presentation impossible. The time it’d take to produce video would make this medium difficult as well.
What to include in a UX report
double the length with stock photos of business people laughing
Because the client’s time is important, an executive summary would be a good start. This would cover, briefly, the most important things you found, how they were found, and the severity of the issues. The purpose of it is to act as ‘the one page you need to read’, so high profile clients can understand the issues without reading the full report.
I’ve then included a table of the issues found, rated by severity. This may seem unusual having this so early, but as the ‘deliverable’ aspect of the report, it will be the part the client will be most interested in. So I’m not going to make them search for it.
Then we get into the supplementary materials, describing how I came to the table of issues. This will include your methodology, information about the setup of the system and the hardware used, and the data you recorded. The data will obviously depend on the type of investigation you performed, either survey responses, or results from a play test or expert evaluation.
To end it all, a conclusion would be similar to your executive summary, but discuss the results in more depth. Perhaps it would describe which issues are most important to deal with first, and the suggested fixes for these. You could also try being nice about the subject, as you want them to hire you again!
I am interested in hearing how other people handle the production of these reports, whether they have any good tips, or approach it from an entirely different direction. Comments below please!
