Entries from October 2008 ↓

Personas Research

Forrester recently released an evaluation of latest trends in using Personas in their How To Get The Most From Design Personas research. I attend the webinar in which they revealed the results of their research, and found that Forrester had some pretty interesting updates on what’s been happening in the world of Personas, some of it new stuff I hadn’t been aware of.

I’ve been using Personas for roughly 10 or so years, but it turns out I’m apparently doing Persona’s all wrong – or at least missing critical elements, and not using Personas to their full extent in my enterprise (I’m so embarrassed). Don’t laugh, according to Forrester you probably are too.

Forrester’s Survey of Persona Use

If you’re a Forrester client, you can download the whitepaper for free. If you’re not a Forrester client you can download the whitepaper for a fee, they’re charging $279, which averages out to about roughly $12 per page. If you intensively use Personas or are considering using Personas you may want to check the whitepaper out.

Briefly, Forrester surveyed 26 firms, interactive agencies, including some of my favs like Organic and Avenue A | Razorfish, and some big enterprises like Charles Schwab, Staples and Wells Fargo, to name a few. They asked for samples of Personas, and they analyzed when, where and how Personas were used at each firm.

Persona Spending Up but Not Used Regularly

According to their analysis, Forrester says the good news is firms planned to spend more in 2008 on customer behavioral research, and spending on Personas continues to increase.

The bad news is the vast majority of Personas out there do not meet what Forrester considers as passing grades in their Persona evaluation. Worse, Personas are not regularly used, and few companies use Personas throughout the design process.

6 Criteria of a Good Persona

According to their research, Forrester believes there are 6 criteria that define a good persona. Among the criteria you know and love, such as making the Persona sound like a real person and making the narrative a good read while being informative, there are some criteria you may not normally associate with Personas. Criteria such as; does the persona call out key attributes AND high-level goals of the user? Another interesting criteria is; the Persona is focused on enabling design decisions. It’s a fascinating side note that in their scoring of all the Personas shared with them for the study, not one of the Personas passed all of the criteria.

Personas Can be Used Across the Enterprise

Here’s something very interesting, I won’t go into the details of why Forrester believes the criteria are important, but I believe in their criteria because according to Forrester, the Personas can be used across the enterprise, to aid decisions from everything from Marketing campaigns, to website design, to signage or even telephone support unit scripting IF the 6 criteria are present. Having the 6 criteria in place ensures you have a clear and accurate Persona with which to make design decisions, for web development as well as Marketing or Customer Service decisions.

For me, I never really considered using a Persona beyond the design of a website or microsite or other web-based application. But I can see the logic of why it makes sense. If you research and define your Persona correctly, and your Persona does indeed represent your typical customer, then it stands to reason you should be able to use the Persona again and again across the enterprise for other design-related decisions.

Personas and Cross-Channel Behavior

Another Persona technique I found new and interesting was mapping all the major touch-points a Persona experiences as they move through a typical task. Think about making a decision to purchase a car. You’ll see a Persona moving back and forth between Brand websites to research the car, potentially TV or radio commercials that tout the car, a dealership or two to test drive the car, potentially 3rd party websites to further analyze other people’s perspective on the car, to finally the seat in front of the financing manager to buy the car. What’s the Persona’s experience across all those cross-channel touch-points, consistent or disjointed? This cross-channel view provides a much greater degree of perspective about how a goal is accomplished by a Persona through all the key touch-points a Brand has, beyond the myopic view of just the web experience. It also bridges the gaps of understanding the complete user experience, which ultimately is the true test of a Brand.

Four Pages of Persona

An example Persona in the Forrester whitepaper provided from by WhittmanHart demonstrated there are four pages that provide information and detail about the Persona (including of course a photo of said Persona in her environment). According to Forrester ala the WhittmanHart example, a Persona should include a story, some basic geographic/income information, the goals of the Persona, issues or opportunities when communicating with the Persona, habits that could be significant, cross-channel touch points, a brief personal history and more… (phew!). Sort of makes me feel like my prior Personas were rather, well, immature.

In my opinion, balancing this greater amount of detail while still maintaining the focus on the essential information necessary to represent a typical customer makes this Persona a more complex, but potentially better tool for design decisions, especially decisions across the enterprise.

I don’t know about you, but my next Persona will be an attempt to replicate this treatment, but it may not be easy considering the great amount of contextual research that needs to take place to gain these insights into customers and Personas.

Personas are Critical for Experience-Based Differentiation

There is additional information in the Forrester report, including the five levels of enterprise Persona usage maturity and a compelling graphic about how Personas enable experience-based differentiation. But of great interest to me are the 2 pages of endnotes, which provides a wealth of additional resources (additional Forrester research) about Personas, experience-based differentiation, customer research and more. There’s easily enough reading in the reports to fill the time it takes to fly from Los Angeles to New York!

Personas & Contextual Observation

Finally, another interesting take-away from the Forrester Persona webinar was information about the latest trends in conducting contextual observation and field research. Turns out there’s an upswing in the usage of diaries. Firms that want a broader perspective into what motivates a Persona use all the usual suspects of field research, but include diaries that participants keep. I’ve been of the opinion that with the recent explosion of online, high-tech “diary” type tools, include MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and more, that finding customer behavior and opinions has never been easier. And yes, the good old fashioned paper-based diaries are still a great way to obtain this ethnographic data as well.

By the way, here’s a hint from me to you at absolutely no-charge; do your Personas have a MySpace or Facebook site? They should! It’s a great way to enable others in your organization to access and learn more about your Personas, plus it adds a bit more reality to your Persona, especially if your Persona is a younger demographic.

Personas Enable Enterprise Design Decisions

So, in conclusion, Personas can be and do more than only be used to design a better website experience. By spending time and energy upfront in conducting contextual observation and field research into your customers, you are able to provide a much richer Persona. This richer, more meaningful Persona can be the basis for many additional design decisions across the enterprise. Plus, this richer, more meaningful Persona can be used across the multiple touch-points that comprises the Brand experience. I think Forrester did a good job with this research, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from them on the subject.

Dana Chisnell of UsabilityWorks recently published an interesting article about conducting quick and dirty usability testing. For all of you who read my little blog, which is probably pretty much only my mom (Hi Mom!), then you know how much I believe in useful usability, aka quick and dirty usability. In fact, I have been saying for many years now that doing any usability is better than doing no usability. Of course you have to be careful how you go about doing your “any usability” or you could end up making things worse than they already are! Ouch!

I love this quote from her article:

“You don’t have to do it by the book to get useful data. But it is different data from what you get from a formal method. There are trade-offs to be made. You do have to understand where the data came from and what it means. You can conduct usability tests that are quick, cheap, and generate all the insights about your users and your design that you can handle.”

Usability Trade-offs

As she so well puts it, it’s the trade-offs that you have to be careful about. Following usability “by the book” so to speak, will ensure the usability testing is done with maximum emphasis on accurate results. Doing quick and dirty usability provides results, but you have to assume less accurate results. The smart practitioner should follow-up quick and dirty usability testing with additional testing after the first round of changes has taken place, to ensure the quick and dirty changes actually improved things, vs making them worse.

Personas are Required

Perhaps the biggest potential failure point when conducting quick and dirty usability is observing or testing users who do not match the Persona of your typical user. One of the most important items of conducting usability testing is understanding and documenting quite clearly who the typical users are, and what their critical tasks are, and rolling that information into the form of a Persona. You then find participants who match the Persona. Easy right? Actually, it’s not that easy, because it takes a real understanding of your users to define what a typical user is. If you skip conducting the research to understand your typical users, then the rest of the usability testing is suspect. If you’ve not identified your Persona or Personae, then stop, do not pass Go, and get that done first. I’ll wait here.

Free Usability Participants

As I mentioned in an earlier posting about finding free usability testing participants, you probably have friends and family that represent a typical Persona, especially if you are working with a business to consumer type of web site or application. That does NOT mean that your great Aunt Mary can be used to test the latest teen heartthrob web site, no matter how many tie-dye T-shirts she still wears. Remember that Persona you identified with your research? You need to find friends and family or others that match the Persona.

Conduct Field Usability Research

Speaking of research, just the act of getting out of your cube or office, and observing real users interacting with your site or application is a great way to learn quickly about possible usability issues that should attract further exploration. It may not be practical to have your entire group follow you around as you lurk over the shoulder of a real user, in their environment, conducting real tasks on your website or application. But if you carry around a video camera, and share the results with your team afterward, its almost the same as having your whole team there. Or better yet, take your team out in small groupings, so that each member has a chance to experience watching real users interact with your website or app. You’ll have even more research done, and each team member will have had the experience of observing real users in their environment.

Read more about Dana’s point of view from her article on quick and dirty usability testing.

You must synchronize with your usability participants to establish a rapport and clear communications

When conducting one-on-one usability testing, you’ll be meeting a variety of people, each of whom has different communication styles. In order to get the most out of the participant and the session, you must synchronize with your usability participant, to help promote open and clear communications between the participant and you. By synchronizing with the usability participant, I am able to more easily make the participant feel calm and at ease, which helps the usability test by promoting a more open and honest dialog from the participant.

How to Synchronize with Usability Participants

When conducting a 1-on-1 usability session, have you ever had a participant who is extremely quiet, who only looks at the screen and provides no verbal feedback? Perhaps you’ve also dealt with a participant who was extremely negative, pretty much finding fault with everything, even before the test starts! I’ve found over the years of conducting testing that the best way to handle these situations is to establish a rapport with the participant, by synchronizing my communication style with their style.

There are multiple steps I use to synchronize, I won’t go into too much detail with each step in this post, but will provide a quick overview of how I synchronize to give you the big picture.

First: I establish open body language and a positive and warm attitude when first meeting the usability participant.

Second: I use my introduction and warm-up session with specially developed open-ended questions to establish what type of communicator this person is.

Third: I match my communication style to the communication type of the participant, either Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic.

First: Establish Open Body Language

Do you sometimes find yourself sitting across from someone with their legs crossed, their arms perhaps crossed over their chest and maybe turned somewhat away from you? Those are all closed body language positions. At other times, do you find yourself across from some who has the arms open, their body directly facing you and perhaps slightly leaning forward? This is an open body language position.

When conducting the preliminary introduction prior to the 1-on-1 usability testing sessions, it’s critical that I immediately establish open body language and a positive attitude, making sure I clearly face my participant, using open gestures and leaning forward & smiling to communicate with them and establish rapport. Usually the other person responds in like manner, and we quickly establish a synchronization of body language. However, at times the participant will demonstrate closed body language to my open position. When this happens, I quickly but smoothly switch my body language to match the participants closed language. As we continue through the introduction, I gradually easy my position to a more open body language, and observe if they start following my lead and synchronizing to a more open body language. By synchronizing with them, I establish a rapport with their body language, and then over the course of the introduction the participant becomes more at ease, and I understand the communication style of the participant.

Second: Use Open-ended Questions

Asking open ended questions, and then observing they communication style of the usability participant as they answer the questions, is an important way I establish exactly what type of communication style the participant uses, which helps me synchronize with them. What’s an open-ended question? “What do you think…?” “How did you like…?” “Why did you say…?” are all examples of open ended questions. They are called open ended questions because they require a response that promotes communication from the participant. Examples of closed ended questions are “Do you like…” “Can you find…” or “Did you see…?” Closed ended questions require a one or two word response back, and are “closed” in the sense that they do not enable a dialog from the participant.

By asking open ended questions to the usability participant, the participant can talk and express themselves. Their answers, and the language they use to answer, provide important insight into how they process information, and how they communicate back to the world this information. Open ended questions are a great warm up device too, they usually get the usability participant more comfortable with talking to me, which after all will be critical to the rest of the usability test. Finally, open ended questions help me frame the domain expertise, the taxonomy and the values the participant brings into the test, which helps me frame and clarify the subsequent responses to the testing that the usability participant will be sharing with me.

Match the Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic Communication Style

I carefully note the words the usability participant uses when answering my open ended questions. Does the usability participant, when answering open ended questions, use words or phrases such as, “appears to me…” “looks like a good idea…” or “clearly it will…”? These are all visual type words, identifying the participant as a Visual type communicator. Perhaps the usability participant uses words like “sounds like a plan…” “I hear you” or “voice my opinion about…” These are all Audio type words which helps define the participant as an Audio type communicator. Maybe the usability participant uses words or phrases such as “feels good to me…” “I’m leaning toward…” or “fits like a glove…” in which case these feeling words help define the participant as a Kinesthetic communicator, one who uses touch or feeling words to define their experience. Remember that nobody will always use only one style of word, and so it takes practice to observe which style of words the usability participant seems to favor.

Once I’ve established what I believe is the communication type of the participant, either Visual, Audio or Kinesthetic, I then match my communication to theirs, to help me synchronize with them and build a rapport. I’ve found that by understanding the communication type it also helps me better define the results of the usability test, for example, understanding that when a visual type communicator tells me she “see that this is organized” she’s not necessarily referring to the visual location or style of the item, but instead may be communicating her belief that the task is relative organized, or simple. I’ll follow-up with additional probing questions in those situations to firmly establish her meaning.

Synchronizing with Usability Participants

In conclusion, by synchronizing with my usability test participants I establish a rapport with the participant which helps produce better testing results by putting the participant at ease. It also helps me establish the expertise and language the participant has. Finally, it builds a communication bridge that enables me to better understand the feedback the user is providing, based on whether they are a Visual, Auditory or Kinesthetic type communicator.