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