Podcast: The UX Power Tools Behind Compelling Software Part...
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Podcast: The UX Power Tools Behind Compelling Software Part 1 Task-based Personas
Prepared for: Macadamian Technologies
No. of pages: 7
Audio recording Identification: UnSalted_ep2 00:10:31
Transcript prepared by : Capital Transcription Services
Host: Graham Machacek, Manager of Marketing Communications, Macadamian Technologies
Guests: Anneliis Tosine, User Experience Researcher, Macadamian Technologies
Sara Fortier, User Experience Designer, Macadamian Technologies
5/14/2013
Podcast: The UX Power Tools Behind Compelling Software Part 1
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++Audio++ 00:00:01 [Intro music]
Welcome to Macadamian’s audio Podcast- unsalted. Strategic insights on software development and
user experience design. We are bringing you snack-sized discussions your brain can munch on. Join the
conversation at macadamian.com.
Graham Machacek: Hi listeners! I am your host Graham Machacek, Manager of Marketing
Communications at Macadamian. Welcome to our mini-series focussing on the
power tools behind compelling software. These are the things we provide our
clients as we move through the user experience research and design process
when we create software products. In this installment, we decided to focus on
task-based personas. I am joined today by two of my colleagues at Macadamian.
First, user experience researcher extraordinaire, Anneliis Tosine. How are you
today?
Anneliis Tosine: I am doing very well Graham; good to be here.
Graham Machacek: And also, Sara Fortier, user experience designer. Sara, how are you?
Sara Fortier: I am good thank-you.
Graham Machacek: You are based in California and we are recording this in the winter, so I will try
not to be jealous.
[Chuckling]
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Graham Machacek: Sara is joining us via Skype. Let us just get right into this topic. Anneliis, first, it
would be great if you could tell listeners why it is important that business
requirements and user requirements be aligned before we start any project. So,
why do we not just start there and then we will go—
Sara Fortier: Sure, I think that is a great spot to start. At Macadamian, we often recommend
to our clients that we start any project with identifying these two types of
requirements. We are talking about business and user requirements and we do
this to help manage risk of these projects. We first start off with our clients in
collaboration with them and start identifying and pulling together their business
requirements. These are business and customer goals, stakeholder value chain
and success metrics. Then, we use a variety of research methods to hone in and
identify their user requirements. These are the real needs of their end-users and
it is based on their use and behaviour. We identify what the user needs in order
to complete a specific goal and this is the foundation of user-centred design.
What we are outlining and identifying in user requirements are user groups,
task identification, context of use and usability goals. We identify all of these
business and user requirements so that we can form the design and this is how
it helps to mitigate the risk. For example, when businesses have an
understanding of their customers’ goals, they are able to bridge that gap
between their own business requirements and their user requirements to
determine what the customer values and essentially what they are willing to pay
for.
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Graham Machacek: Anneliis, what are personas and usage scenarios? Maybe you can tell us where
they fall into the process of designing a software product.
Anneliis Tosine: Sure. From these user requirements and from that phase in collaboration with
our client, the real great and more valuable deliverable that comes out of that
are these task-based personas which is our focus for today. These personas
function as stand-ins for real users to guide decisions about design and
functionality. This document can capture a number of personas which are
typical users of the product. It outlines their goals, provides insights into how
they would want to use the product to achieve those goals. This information has
to be tallied in some kind of fashion so that designers and developers can
consume throughout the course of the development process. A persona can do
this very well; it can help give direction to the team and really personalized the
end users. We distill all of this information into personas and this is what we
provide back to the product team.
Graham Machacek: Okay, how do you know if you have captured everything correctly and recorded
the real essence of your user groups?
Anneliis Tosine: That is a great question and we get that a lot. We can use a number of different
activities to do this—to validate the personas such as ethergraphic research.
This approach, an Ethernet graphic approach, helps us better understand the
people and the organizations we design for not only to get them products that
address their needs, but also it starts to reveal their shared attitudes or goals,
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their practices that influence decisions and adoption of the product and on-
going use of a particular product.
Graham Machacek: Okay. Sara, I am Just going to check in with you know. I just want to know what
risks in your view are associated with products that do not incorporate task-
based personas. Let us get into the meat of it here!
Sara Fortier: Sure. I mean, this is something that we run into a lot with clients given that
selling research services can be a bit more challenging, but task-based personas
really help provide context for the business and user requirements. When you
get into an actual situation where you are developing software—you are
designing for the user and sort of asking yourself what the user would want in a
situation. Personas really help to focus the design task and development task to
look and see what their motivations are and what that actual person would be
doing—what would John Smith do in this situation? Later in the product
development process, the personas also aid in communication and help to
prioritize the trade-offs and other considerations you come across when you are
making product design decisions. The bottom line is that they are useful
throughout the entire user experience design process.
Graham Machacek: We should probably share some case studies of what has gone wrong when
task-based personas are not use. Do you have any more specific kinds of
examples?
Sara Fortier: I mean, as I have mentioned, we run into this with our clients sometimes where
we do not always have the opportunity to do Ethernet graphic research to come
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up with our task-based personas and it really effects the success of the product
because you have to make certain assumptions as you are designing for a user
that you actually do not know enough about.
Graham Machacek: I am guessing sometimes some clients might think it is not necessary because
they have been working with the user group for so long—is that the idea or
maybe they have done other research?
Sara Fortier: Yes, exactly. Clients will basically give you their assumptions that they think their
customers or users want and we have to help guide them and fill them in on
who their users actually are. Sometimes they will not line up with their
expectations.
Graham Machecek: Yes, but sometimes probably that is a good thing; you probably get some
insights out of that that lead to new discoveries and a better product.
Sara Fortier: Yes, absolutely.
Graham Machacek: Anneliis, can you share some examples of how task-based personas have helped
focus some decisions—some real decision and hard decisions that people have
to make?
Anneliis Tosine: Of course. Like Sara has mentioned, these personas help make decisions with
those end-users in mind. We are really bridging that gap of knowledge that
maybe missing and we are bridging the gap between development and U X in
order to show us why something, let us say it is a feature or content, is
important in the product. By using a persona to answer questions like what
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information is necessary at what point in a work flow or does the user have
frequent interruptions during their experience or why are they using the
product, so by answering some of these questions teams can actually be in the
user’s shoes and better understand what a real user needs and wants. In
essence, personas are observations and descriptions of why a person does what
he/she may do. What they start to help to do is take focus away from
requirements and deliverables for a designer so they can really focus on the
user’s goals. Essentially, if you do not know who you are designing for, you
cannot actually design anything.
Graham Machacek: Yes, good point. Sara, what is the one thing CEOs of software companies need
to know about personas—let us start with that audience.
Sara Fortier: As I was kind of mentioning before, the idea that CEOs and companies—they all
have expectations about who their users are and who their customers are and it
is really important for them to understand that we are not actually looking for
opinions or who they think their users are. We are really concentrating on
motivations and looking for the needs and what is driving the user—why are
they trying to accomplish a certain task and how do they need to get there. In
the end, the project team really needs to know that in order to figure out what
the new features are going to be and if you want to expand into new markets or
come up with new offerings, you can only really do that through the user
research and through coming up with these personas.
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Graham Machacek: Yes, okay. Same question, but let us talk about product managers. What are the
things that product managers need to know about personas?
Sara Fortier: Well, I think it is similar, but just more tactical maybe. Personas sort of allow
you to understand, identify and communicate to the whole team what the
needs are and it does it in a really efficient and effective way. The product
manager should be using these with their developers, designers and pushing it
also to their clients just so everyone can align themselves on what those
motivations and needs are and having that tangible artifact helps them do that.
Graham Machecek: And on other audience we should definitely mention is software engineers—
what about for software engineers? What considerations should they be
thinking about in terms of personas?
Sara Fortier: For engineers in particular, we have found that it can be really useful to give
them that ‘why’ because when they get into the nitty-gritty when they are
working on a particular user story they do not always know why they are
actually doing it. Sometimes a lot of compromises are made because it is
quicker to develop and easier for them, but when they actually understand from
a user’s perspective why it is important to develop it in a certain way, the
engineers are a lot more motivated to do it that way too.
Graham Mackecek: Alright. Thanks everyone for tuning into our mini-series on the power tools
behind compelling software and it has been really interesting listening to all of
the information on task-based personas and we hope you will tune into our
other additions that are coming shortly. Thanks so much and have a great week!
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