1. Beyond TaskBased Testing:
Interviews &
Personas
October 29, 2013
Darlene Fichter
Jeff Wisniewski

2. Road Map
 What’s
a persona?
 Benefits of personas
 Isn’t task based testing enough? Do I
need to do personas too?
 How to create personas

Interviewing and other methods
 How
to use personas

3. Caveats
 Design
/= visual design
 Design = product design as a whole from
features, colors, interactions, content,
organization, etc.

4. Personas
 Personas
are “stand ins” or hypothetical
archetypes created to represent the
primary user segments for your web site
 Each persona represents a key user type
that shares demographic
characteristics, needs, behaviours, and
environment

5. Personas
 Although
personas are imaginary they are
derived from user research
 Each persona is given a name and
personal details to make them more
realistic

6. 





second year graduate student in
Biological Enngineering
currently splits her time between class
work, time in the lab, and studying from
home
since much of her work is either course
driven or in the lab, she does not
consider herself a particularly heavy
library user
tends to rely on lectures rather than
library resources
uses company websites quite frequently
for information on the lab products she
uses and uses professional association
sites for recent papers and information
on developments in her field
uses the popular search engines initially
to get a sense of what types of
materials are out there then moves to
Web of Science and Compendex for
access to journal articles
Amy (SooJin)

7. 




if she can avoid going to the
library, she will
at home she always connects
through remote access to get
access to full articles through the
databases for which the library has
subscription
interested in doing exhaustive
searches for journal articles on her
dissertation topic
no one has shown her how to use
the full breadth of the resources and
functionality of e-Journal on the
library web site; she has a sense
there are more resources and tools
than she knows about
uses ILL often to gain access to
articles that she cannot access
through Pitt subscriptions

8. Customer Segments to
Personas
 Originated
in the 1930’s for marketing
brands started using fictional characters
to represent a customer segment
 Alan Cooper, a software
developer, coined a related term and
similar practice: personas.
 His book The Inmates are Running the
Asylum popularized the use of personas
and designing for “archetypal users”.

9. Benefits of Personas

10. #1 “User” Centered Design
 Way
to have users attend all your design
meeting that representative of the major
user types
 Each persona has the weight
 Personas are based on and embody
what we know about our library’s web site
users
Personas
keeping it about the user

11. #2. Support Evidence Based
Decision Making
 Way
to harness the user research data to
inform web site development
 Easier to remember a persona than pages
of facts and figures: path data, survey
results, interview summaries etc.
 Share abstract data in a compelling and
memorable way
Personas
encapsulate evidence

12. #3 Where to put design effort
 Personas
spell out what the site needs to
do
 Persona goals and task provide a focus
-Avoid scope creep
- Elastic band users
Personas
provide focus

13. #4. Communicate to
Stakeholders in a Language
Understood by Everyone
 Easy
and fun way to communicate design
decisions
 Keeps the focus on the user
 Avoid “geek” speak
Personas
speak to everyone

14. #4 Build Consensus and
Commitment to the Design
 Communicate
a common direction
 Reduce the need for extremely detailed
specifications. Nuances of behaviours
and preferences are captured in the
persona and narratives
Personas
build shared vision

15. Task Based Testing
 How
personas work with task based
testing

16. Task Based Testing
 Extremely
useful
 Evidence of how users actually use your
site
Are you getting the most value out of your task based testing
investment?

17. Task Based Testing
 Even


on a shoestring, still resource intensive
Usability testing takes time
Only do one test or maybe 2 or 3 iterations due to
resource constraints
 Most
designs need many iterations
Using personas allows you to raise the base level of the
design that you use for task based testing

18. Small Studies & Representative
Sample
A
small “shoestring” usability study usually
can only pull in a few participants broadly
categorized by age, gender, year in
school if an educational
setting, department/profession in a firm
etc.
 But are these the broad categories that
help us zero in on primary user types?

19. The Tasks
Where do the tasks come from?
 Some are easy. i.e. frequently used on
the web site now. We know that our 30
study rooms are booked around the clock
from the online form.
 What about designing bookable study
room form on the mobile site? Is there
interest? How/when/where/who would
use it and what’s the best design?

20. Tasks
Some Tasks are Tar Pits

Find an article on ....
 Do
we know based on user research (or just
on our personal hunches) the typical way this
questions is approached by primary user
types? What happens when they have too
large a search result? Null result?

Find out how to borrow a laptop from the
Library.
 Will
they browse or search?
 If search has too many results, what will they
try next?

21. Personas
Reality check that helps you create better
tasks

22. How to Create Personas
Research!



Environmental scan
Interviews
Ethnographic research

23. Environmental scanning
 Identify
true peers
 Literature review
 Web search
 Provides a framework

24. Ethnographic research
 Gorillas
in the Mist
 Time consuming
 Expensive
 Highly useful!

25. Interviews
 Useful
for creating from scratch and for
local validation of “borrowed”

26. Finding subjects
 Leverage
your networks
 General advertising not useful

27. Logistics
 Voice
recorder of smartphone app
 Transcription
 Analysis

28. What to ask and how to ask it
 What


you’re doing and why
You’re helping us build a better website
Be candid
 General


computer usage habits
When you start your browser where’s are
the first places you go?
Favorite sites, and why?

29. What to ask and how to ask it
 If
you need to:
Find books to take on vacation
 Write a paper
…Where’s the first place you’d go?


30. What to ask and how to ask it






How often do you go to the library?
How often do you go to the library website?
When do you go to the library website? What
do you do when you’re there? (Take them to
site)
What immediately draws your attention?
What information did you look for but not
find?
Is there something you looked for on the
homepage but didn’t find?

31. Now what?
Interview
Create
Refine

32. How many personas ?
 Primary
constituencies
 5-7 generally recommended

33. How to use the personas
 In
the room
 Frame discussions

35. Your Next Team Meeting
What does Leonard think?
http://static.tvguide.com/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/A_F/Bi_Bp/Big_Bang_Theory/season4/big-bangtheory298.jpg

36. Question?

37. Thanks!