This week’s lecture covered content strategy and user personas.
To understand how to strategise content we went over what makes good content throughout the lecture.
The lecture started off by explaining that ‘good content is appropriate’. This means that content is appropriate when it helps them accomplish their goals. With making content appropriate comes knowing your consumer.
For a designer there is a series of things we must take into account about our user base:
- Disability
- Gender
- Geolocation
- Their familiarity with content etc…
To make the digital products we produce satisfy the widest base of users, personalisation tools within our products and responsive products in range of device types, help us with this.
User Personas
User personas can be a great way to model and summarise research trends and patterns to others.
Each persona serves as a single surrogate for a certain group of users. To make these you should put yourself in the user’s position and think of their end goal and create around that. As well as that you should conduct a small interview or observe and adequate amount of people and find patterns in their responses/actions. Use these to group similar people together
From this create an archetypical model of each group, making a user persona.
What are personas used for?
- Build empathy
- Develop focus
- Communicate and form consensus
When interviewing your user group ask them open ended questions and specific stories or to show not tell.
Fathom Talk
Andrew McCrea a UX designer at Fathom joined va zoom to give us a presentation of Fathom’s UX placement opportunities. As usual I took some notes.
Research for User Personas
I researched a little further into what makes a good user persona and I found this website. In this they explain that tailoring your website to your specific users’ needs can increase your success rate up to 75%, using the company Smallpdf as an example.
In this site they give you the 4 questions you should be asking your user groups, they are:
- Why are you using similar sites right now?
- What are your end goals with these sites?
- What is your profession?
- What have been your frustrations with previous products?
I also wrote down some other information I found on User personas:
I will make a google form including questions like these to send to people in the user groups, for my Elements project, which includes teachers and students of chemistry.
Before this, however I will conduct a short interview of just these questions to people I know in these fields. That includes; my brother, his flat mate, my friend and my mother. I will also send them the google form but this is for some user research I can do quite quickly.
User interviews
Each interviewee will have an assigned letter for handiness…
Brother- Will be person A
Mother – Will be person B
Friend –Will be person C
Brother’s flat mate – Will be person D
Question 1
Why are you using similar sites?
A- Update my knowledge of periodic table and chemistry. Wouldn’t use them very often.
B- To remember properties of elements including valency for balancing equations. Also to give resource for students.
C- To memorise elements and properties
D- To help with memorisation of all elements and properties as well as improve upon knowledge of each element.
Question 2
What are your end goals with these sites?
A- To refresh memory of elements, maybe quiz myself.
B- To be knowledgeable on subject to give support to students.
C- To help with exam questions, refresh memory of periodic table. Maybe learn more about their electronic configuration.
D- To keep open as a tab while I study to have all the information on hand when I need a refresher or help.
Question 3
What is your profession?
A – A-Level chemistry + Mechanical Engineer
B – Lecturer of Food Chemistry
C -Studies medicine
D – Completing post-grad Chemistry degree
Question 4
What were your frustrations with similar products?
A – Not challenging enough or too basic.
B – Didn’t have accurate information which is bad for educational purposes.
C -Was too basic, might as well have used standard paper version.
D – Information was inaccurate or the website felt too crowded.
In summary, this short little interview was very helpful in getting me started for my User interviews I will be creating a google forms doc I can share with them, A level teachers from my previous school and my mother’s co-workers.
Google Form
This is the link to the full form.
I have designed some of my own data charts to correspond with the more important responses from the form.
In summary of the data I recieved:
- 100% of users would enjoy some form of quiz/ gamified attribute to product
- 60% had used a similar product before. The most popular being ‘Ptable’ a website product
- 100% of users would like minimal different colours in product
- The main goals of users were: To have all information in one place and to understand and memorise elements and their properties
- 100% of users would like balancing equation help and were 50% split among the other choices
Conclusion
The users of my product would appreciate having accurate information all in one place and would enjoy having a quiz/gamified element. The other useful information I was not expecting was the websites were more preferred as they were quicker and easier to open for most devices when necessary.
Start designing User Personas
These are some sketches I made of what my user personas could look like…
The sketches I liked the most out of these was the 1st and 4th sketch
After this I started digitally designing …
The design I ended up with was a crossover between the 2 sketches I liked.
I really liked the the icons and the layout of the content side of the card but I think I should change the photo used and the design of the front of the card.
I made some changes and improvements to this design, the created these 3 user personas…
Overall I’m happy with how these personas came out, the information I’ve gathered from conducting user interviews and surveys has really helped me understand the user’s point of view and what they need from my product. I will keep these user personas in mind while completing my project.