Content Strategy
This week we learnt about content strategy and user personas. Within this lecture, we were taught about the basic principles of content strategy, as well as the craft of content strategy. We also went into learning about user personas, why they’re useful, and how to effectively create one.
What makes good content?
- Good content is appropriate – It must help users achieve their goals. Offer content when a user needs it, and in the format that they need it in.
- Content without context is useless
- Know your consumers – Think about demographics & devices they may use
- Good content is useful – What are you trying to improve, and who for?
- Good content is user-centred – The user should be able to easily figure out what to do, and how to reach their goal when using the product.
- Good content is clear, concise, and consistent
- Good content is supported
Content people work for the user
If your content doesn’t meet the user’s goals quickly, they’ll leave the site. Therefore, having good content strategy is fundamental in good UX design.
Balance the content, and consider context
This is the best way to order content:
- Most important info.
- Supporting details
- General info.
Users are people too
The products we design in UX are about people, and are for people. With this in mind, there are a few things we must consider when creating good content:
- Accessibility
- Creating a good user experience
- Where will they be using the product? How will it appear there? How will we accommodate to that?
- Consider creating a user-flow diagram
Evaluate, design, execute.
Understanding the users
Seeing as we are not our users, we must design for them and not ourselves.
UX design is about creating a solution for the user’s problems, and not just designing something in a particular way just because we like how it looks. The best way to fully consider the user and their needs is to conduct user research – and from that, create user personas. This will help us understand the users on a deeper level, and put ourselves into their shoes.
User Personas
User personas are a way to model, summarise, and communicate our user research.
Each persona acts as a single surrogate for many users.
How are user personas presented?
User personas are usually a one-page document, and it is used to summarise and communicate research trends and patterns to others. This can be useful when working in a team, and with other teams. The fundamental understanding of users is the most important part of all of this.
How are user personas created?
- Interview and observe an adequate amount of people
- Find patterns in the interviewees’ responses and behaviour – use this to group similar people
- Create archetypal models of the groups based on the patterns found
- Create user-centred designs drawing from that understanding of the users
What may be included in user personas?
- Name
- Demographics
- Descriptive title
- End goals and needs
- Skills
- Attitudes
- Frustrations
- Background info.
- Behaviour patterns
- Personality
Why are user personas important?
User personas allow us to gain an understanding of the target audience. They help a product team find the answer to the question “who are we designing for?”. By understanding the expectations, concerns, and motivations of the target users – it is possible to design a product that can satisfy their needs.
User personas also allow us to adopt a perspective similar to the user. We can think about their needs, and infer about them. They also allow us to easily identify with the user, and truly understand what it is they want and need from a product.
Five steps to creating user personas:
- Collect info. about users
- Identify behavioural patterns
- Create personas and prioritise them
- Find scenarios of interaction and create user personas UX documentation
- Share findings and gain acceptance from the team
What next?
From this lecture, we were tasked to create our own user personas for the Element Project.
To do this, I will first write a questionnaire and use it to conduct the user research that I will be basing my personas on.
Thoughts
I found this lecture to be really insightful and interesting. One of the things I love most about UX is being able to gain a better understanding of people, and then using that understanding to improve on my designs – and make them more useful. I am looking forward to conducting my research and creating the user personas to match.