Over the past few years as a web designer I’ve noticed a lack of education specific to people like me. Let me take you through an example. But keep in mind, this isn’t the only example I could use, there are many.
I recently heard the wonderful Jared Spool speak on the topic of personas at the UPA Boston mini conference. The usefulness of personas notwithstanding (not getting into that can of worms here), I walked away from his talk with a familiar, looming question:
Can robust personas be built by a single designer, with limited time and resources?
I asked Jared, and his response was “it depends, but yes.” It was encouraging to hear, no doubt! But where do I start? His talk outlined how he built robust personas in 30 days. The robust part is because the personas his team built used data gathered from real users. As opposed to using made up quotes and information. Now, of course I don’t expect or assume that a single person, with limited time and resources could do it in exactly the same way as someone with a team of experts could do it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t make personas at all, does it? There has to be some way for me to build them. Perhaps that means using less data or spreading out my work over a longer period of time.
Specific examples for a specific audience
And that ambiguity is exactly where encouragement alone fails to be helpful. I need examples! I need realistic case studies of how someone like me succeeded in building personas. I need to know how they approached them, and how it impacted the problems they were trying to solve.
Without relevant examples, I frequently get the feeling that it’s an all or nothing situation. It’s like when people say “usability testing is expensive, time consuming, and takes an expert to translate the results.” That’s obviously not true, and we can benefit from doing even the smallest of studies. The difference is, I’ve seen examples of how usability studies on a shoe-string budget work. I have not seen examples of low-budget personas. (Again, not picking on personas, the same argument could be made for design pattern frameworks or mental models. The list goes on and on.)
It’s not Jared’s problem
I’m not putting this responsibility on Jared. It’s not his problem if I can’t translate his approach to my situation. I’m not asking him to meet me halfway. And I’m definitely not suggesting he should change the way he presents personas to his audiences. He rocks, and should stick to his guns.
But I’m not going to learn how to do personas from examples of how to do it with a team of experts. And I’m not going to learn how to build a design pattern framework, or mental models, if the examples are coming from that same frame of reference. Excluding examples for the loners is missing the mark for many. The newbies (myself included) need the right kind of examples that are relevant to our needs.
Who’s coming with me?
I know I’m not alone in this. There are people in the web industry that are in the same position as me. That is, not much experience, no mentor, and no help from an army of designers, developers, and researchers.
So I’m rallying the troops. I don’t know what’s next, but there is an opportunity here. Can we educate each other with relevant examples of these emerging concepts? It would be awesome if there were a blog, a conference, a community, or all 3, that is specifically for this crowd.
Who wants to help me? Email me, leave a comment below, or get a hold of me on Twitter. Thank you!
Update: Please read my follow up post: UX Examples for Start-ups. I received some great feedback, so I summarize some of it. And I decided that I would blog about the examples I see missing from the community. Thanks again for reading.
What do you think?
11 comments
1 Hilary Bienstock Jun 18, 2009 at 11:41 am
I think that a lot of people in our field are in your position, or will be at some point in their career. A community would be very valuable.
As for personas specifically, The Persona Lifecycle by Pruett and Adlin is choc-full of examples of how to build personas, including teams of one with shoestring budgets and tight timeframes as well as larger teams. However, for personas most especially, I would advise you to include as many of your co-workers and teammates as possible, even if they are not UX professionals — even minimal time commitments from them will increase the quality of your personas as well as the buy-in from your team.
2 alastair simpson Jun 18, 2009 at 6:46 pm
I completely agree with your comments and yes there are lots of us in the same position! The IxDA community has started a mentoring programme http://www.ixda.org/mentee.php aimed I believe at solving some of these very problems.
I have had to build personnas by myself, I am fortunate in that the target market for our websites are small business owners. So my research consists of talking to my local coffee shop owner, independent store owner or friends who run their own businesses. This gives me a base of information, when combined with the knowledge of the “right way” to do it gets me to a final personna. Its certainly not perfect, however it has helped provide check points in my own design process where I really stop and consider if what I am building is really going to resonate with my target market.
3 Kevin Hoffman Jun 19, 2009 at 3:22 am
What’s up Jason. I really like the design of your blog.
On this topic, I can’t really say enough good things about Dan Brown’s book Communicating Design. A great resource that collects simple overviews on the most common and most valuable UX documentation tools, with beginner advice and advanced insights to boot. While I was teaching at the University of Baltimore, we considered this required reading.
4 Joan Vermette Jun 19, 2009 at 9:48 am
Started writing a comment; it turned into a novel. ;-) Anyway, here goes:
Jason, I think the first thing a “team of none” needs to do is to detach from a particular technique or tool and understand rather what that tool is supposed to do for them. In the overwhelming amount of materials that UX’ers publish about our practice and ourselves, it can be hard to dig through those details to understand what each technique or tool is getting at. We get attached to them as ‘deliverables,’ and forget about their intended results.
In this instance, the value of personas is that they help the team keep the contexts of their various users in mind as it designs and builds a product.
So how, as a single UX designer in a small company, how might you accomplish that end for your team? Consider these factors that make up a user’s context:
Their overall goals
Immediate task needs
Time horizons for their use
Personal resources (i.e., money)
Physical environments
Emotional triggers/disposition
Domain familiarity
Familiarity with your brand or company
Technical savvy
Other stuff? Did I miss anything?
And then come up with a string of hypotheses about each of these factors. Where do you come up with the hypotheses? Look at site stats, talk with your customer service support people, read comments/emails from your users. Look at secondary literature, if there are good quality articles or research about your industry. Use yourself, look at and ask your friends and family and broader networks. Ask your team members. Crowdsourcing is free; surveys are free and/or cheap.
Now don’t get me wrong: you are not using those sources to necessarily provide you with definitive answers. You are using them to formulate better questions. That is, if you don’t have the close contact to users that you would wish for in a perfect world given your resources, at least you should have a rich and varied set of hypotheses about who your users are: what they want, what tasks they’re going to want to do, under what conditions they’re using your site, etc. This way, you bring your assumptions to light, force yourself to think of many other possibilities, and begin to frame them as sets of questions that you hope you can eventually answer.
Also know that if you CAN do user research – say, ethnographic studies – and haven’t articulated your assumptions and don’t come into that with a rich, varied set of questions, it may not be worth the time and money invested in it, anyway. See Jan Chipchase’s article “The Blind Leading the Deaf” for more on that: http://www.janchipchase.com/
Engage the rest of your team in those hypotheses; be persistent in your discussions with the team about them. This will create better results, and will lead to a general rise in the level of curiosity about your users. That may eventually lead to a reallocation of resources so that you can actually talk to them, and will prepare you to talk to them in a way that will be more meaningful and fruitful.
If you can’t get to your users before usability testing, use the test opportunity itself to gather your data (but if you do that, try to test as early as possible so you have the time in your project schedule to act on what answers you may get!) If you can’t do formal usability testing with real users, then go back to your personal networks and your team and do it. Some is better than none.
Then use the questions and whatever test results you get to guide your team to guide your design choices. The proof is in your sales (or your usage, depending on the type of site you’re building). So choose, launch, measure, and listen. Rinse, lather and repeat.
So, in summary, I’m saying
1. Stop asking if you’re creating the right deliverables and start asking if you’re doing the right thinking
2. Start doing that thinking immediately using whatever you’ve got at your disposal. Counter your own prejudices by creating lots of alternatives.
3. Get your team involved.
4. Choose a solution, launch and measure.
Make sense? Any of this sound doable? Did it create clarity or add to the general noise? Let me know.
5 Jason Robb Jun 20, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Hillary: Thanks for the recommended reading, I’ll be sure to check it out.
Alastair: Yes, I’ve signed up for the IxDA mentor program, I’m very excited to get started. Thanks for speaking up!
Kevin: That’s an excellent book! I’ll have to reread it, since it’s been a while. I appreciate the kind words about my blog design, too!
Joan: Your novel was much appreciated it. Your summary of suggestions resonate well with how we’re set up at my start-up. I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve got another post coming up, that summarizes some feedback that I got and proposes a direction I’m taking with this blog. Thanks again!
6 Jared M. Spool Jun 21, 2009 at 6:52 am
Hi Jason,
You ask some excellent questions here. I do think it’s possible for an individual to complete all the steps for building personas. It will take time, energy, and resources. But, when you’re done, will the results benefit the design? That’s the big question.
I’m wondering if you’re really a team of none (or one). If others are making decisions that will change the resulting design, then you have a team of multiple folks.
Personas and other UX tools are about informing the team — helping them make better decisions. And the process of building personas is actually the part the informs, not the end deliverable. (See my post on how personas documents are not personas.
Certainly, as the UX person on the team, you can help with the adminstrative bits that go into persona development: planning and scheduling the research, coordinating the intermediate deliverables, facilitating the discussions, and keeping the personas alive in design discussions (”So, how would Rachel approach this function? If she’s trying to get her appointment scheduled quickly, how does this allow her to do that?”).
Remember, you can judge the success of a personas project by how much it constantly influences the outcome of the design. If you hear the team saying, “I would’ve designed it this way, but after seeing the participants in our research, I’m now leaning to this alternative approach,” then you know you’re on the right track.
Hope this helps,
Jared
7 Jason Robb Jun 21, 2009 at 9:04 am
Jared: You are correct in asserting that I’m not working alone. My reason for using the title of “a team of none” was purely for contrast. I was merely jesting at the fact that I’m a solo UX designer working with engineers and stakeholders, not a UX designer working with other UX designers.
Those are excellent bits of encouragement, Jared. I definitely appreciate you taking the time to explain them. That was helpful.
I’ve learned a lot about personas in the past week. I’m beginning to see where they come into the picture. But first, I must do research!
Thanks again!
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10 Jason Grant Jun 23, 2009 at 5:23 am
Hey, interesting article.
Please do keep in touch. I am not sure if I can help you on this, but I’m always in the process of learning, so you never know what we might be able to learn from each other. I’m having to deal with some personas on the project I am on at the moment.
11 James Sinclair Jun 23, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Great article. I’ve often felt the same way.