My First User Persona

When I'm hired to do Quality Assurance Usability or User Interface testing, the role I play best is the "new user" because most of the time that's exactly what I am. My first pass at a project is the most enjoyable because everything is new and I have to figure out how it works, whether "it" is a website or software application. Subsequent testing may involve writing test cases based on business and functional specifications, or tasks, where I assign myself things to do or look for and my steps are recorded.

Companies may spend a large chunk of money on user testing and many have entire departments for Quality Assurance testing. The collected data is used to make improvements or enhancements or worse, halt entire projects due to critical defects. For smaller software development companies and homegrown ecommerce websites, the budget just isn't there for full-blown, experienced team-driven testing and analysis. Some companies, sadly enough, don't see the value of knowing their users at all and send out software or websites that fail to bring back a return on their investment. Entire dotcom companies died off because they forgot about their users, or didn't properly get to know them.

Enter User Personas. Developed by Alan Cooper of Cooper.com to "capture a process that he intuitively used to invent and evaluate software", and written about extensively by Kim Goodwin, Director of Design at Cooper, user personas have yet to hit mainstream development. I think it's because the Cooper methodolgy is more than smaller shops or one-person designers can possibly hope to afford. Says Goodwin in Getting from Research to Personas:Harnessing the Power of Data, "The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona."

To hire Cooper to create personas can be costly. I worked for a company who did and I've seen their work. It's quite impressive. Now, on my own as a consultant, I wanted to learn more about them by actually creating them myself and applying them to my own work. I would have to devise my own version, without the resources Cooper has. My biggest resource was my own imagination. Armed with everything I could possibly read on the subject (resources below), I applied a user persona on a project for a client who wanted to rebuild their existing website. I knew the business and some functional specifications for the website. They had little usable demographic data on their users, so I made up one persona and acted out my role as a web user behaving as the user persona I created. It was very interesting!

Meet Susan Norman

Susan is a college educated 38 year old female, married for 7 years to a busy husband whose work as a Director of Environmental Resources for an assisted care living facility leaves less time for family. Susan works outside the home too, plus runs the household, and so is used to doing several things at once. Susan wears contact lenses and is seeking discount coupons to help offset the maintenance care for them. She's also trying to stay on top of her children's vision care needs, wanting to know what she should look out for. Her husband mentioned a relative interested in laser surgery and she'd like to learn more about it.

Susan's behavior style is to do her own research and gather as many facts as possible before making any decisions. She likes to use the Internet for this and relies on search engines to help her find information. Unfortunately since she's at home with the kids managing things while her husband is still tied up at the office, she's interrupted often while she does her research and has to stop and start reading pages, or outright quickly bookmark pages or print them to read later.

A Cooper persona would be much more detailed, even down to what Susan had for breakfast and if her best friend is flying in from out town to spend the weekend. They really nail down what's inside the head of a user so they can discover what they want and how they'll get what they want from a website or software application they use. As Kim Goodwin notes,"Rather than asking users what they want, it is more effective to focus on what users do, what frustrates them, and what gives them satisfaction."

Tasks
My client's website covers vision healthcare and is well established on the Internet and search engines. Susan would have no trouble finding it, so I didn't test for this. What I did was assign Susan several tasks. One was "Find out if any discount contact lenses solution products w/sales or discounts are available." I won't go into all the details of her experience, but here's a few things Susan found. Being in a hurry and a savvy web user, she wanted to go directly to the search box, but alas, she couldn't find it right away, although it did, in fact, exist on the page. She tried all kinds of things and after 13 minutes (I timed each task and recorded each step), she gave up looking for sales on a specific item.

I assigned several other tasks, including "Find advice for child eye healthcare. Is there a checklist or reminder list for parents?" When it came to providing information, Susan could locate everything she wanted in under 2 minutes. While "acting as Susan" I also noted whether or not I would be able bookmark pages easily because Susan was bound to be interrupted often and she wanted to be able to show some things later to her husband, or email him her findings. She wanted to be able to comfortably view the pages knowing if a young child approached her they wouldn't be subjected to objectionable pictures on the computer screen. The content of the website was written in a language she could understand, and even remember when chatting later with friends.

Do you see where I'm going with this? This was just ONE user. Imagine if you could get into the head of a sampling of your website or software users? What would they tell you?

I could time my tasks, record my steps, and if I felt my user persona wanted to click off somewhere, I could note that too. For my client I tested business objectives and created tasks based on them too. Did they provide proof of being an authority on their subject? Susan cared enough to find out and the website made sure her answer was provided. Does yours? Any place where Susan had trouble was great feedback to my client's website team who wants to rebuild a better product. I gave them leads to stimulate discussions on problem solving based on user requirements they didn't even know they had, such as learning they had a user who wanted to find discount items on their site, and couldn't do that easily.

My first experience experimenting with user personas provided genuine insight into why Alan Cooper saw the value in it. His team blends the needs of real people and the needs of the company wanting to meet them, but who aren't sure how to do that. Sometimes a company demands a design based on what marketing tells them is vital, which isn't always the most accurate picture for overall user requirements. My approach was elementary compared to what the skilled people at Cooper can do, but not entirely worthless. I'm convinced that even a small attempt at user personas in testing can be done by small businesses or home-based ones. Give it a try if you have a flair for acting and role playing. See what problems or solutions you can find for your project when you can pretend to be someone new.

Resources

• Personas and User Profiles - by the Usability Special Interest Group
• Perfecting Your Personas - by Kim Goodwin, Director of Design
• What To Include in a User Persona - nice checklist
• MSN Explorer: Usability Research Underlies the Elegance, Ease and Functionality of MSN's New Integrated Web Experience for Consumers - Ignore the long title. There's some good info in the article on creating personas and how to apply them.
• Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals - By Christine Perfetti, Consultant, User Interface Engineering
• Interview with Cooper's Kim Goodwin by UIE.com
• Getting from Research to Personas:Harnessing the Power of Data - by Kim Goodwin