from personas to production: the role of personas, design briefs, stories, storyboards, and...
TRANSCRIPT
Paul Sherman Sherman Group User Experience
The Role of Personas, Design Briefs, Stories, Storyboards and Wireframes in the Ideation/Design/Build Process
It’s easy to become trapped into a product-‐ or market-‐ centered
perspective… and lose site of what the customer needs.
The UX field gives you tools to put and keep focus on the customer, release
after release.
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It’s easy, actually…
Go visit the customers Profile them
Build personas from the profiles Tell the customers’ stories (“agile”-‐ly)
Illustrate the stories
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Leads to feature matrix thinking…
And a “presence-‐absence” mindset…
Which de-‐emphasizes designing to satisfy users’ goals and workflow.
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Too market-‐focused:
Thinking about customers at the market level, not in terms of individuals, their goals, and their workflow.
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That is… know your customers’… Capabilities and constraints Goals Workflow Context of use
Note: you can’t get this from a survey or a focus group session.
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Why? Two great reasons: 1. Self-‐report is unreliable. (People don’t
mean to lie, they just do.)
2. Remove people from their context, and you can’t see – and they can’t remember -‐ the details of their tasks.
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“Can’t you just figure that stuff out?”
Not so much…
Good product design flows from understanding the users…and
understanding them means observing them.
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“We don’t have time to go into the field!”
I call BS on that…
It’s not hard or time-‐consuming if done right…plus it prevents churn.
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“It’s too expensive!”
You can do quality user research for a few thousand dollars.
If you can’t afford that, you have other problems.
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Generating insights from field observation is not hard or time-‐consuming.
But sharing and socializing it is critical. We’ll cover this before the end of the session.
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Have I convinced you that you need qualitative, detailed, individual-‐level user research?
If not, let me tell you a story…
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At my former company we nearly missed a big gap in the product experience…
…and we only found the problem through field observations.
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What did we miss?
The install experience was too hard.
We thought it was decent. but when we took the beta to new customers and watched what happened… we wanted to cry.
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1. Converting observation insights into useful product management and design guidance.
2. Using the content to socialize insights, attain alignment, and maintain focus on the customer.
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Where’s the user in that?
Yeah, there’s actors…but does UML really tell you anything about your users?
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A BRD with business requirements AND… A design brief Personas built from user observations User stories (in agile format) Storyboards with wireframes
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Don’t make it too complex!
Include stuff like goals, tasks and context.
But don’t go crazy… it’s not rocket science!
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Again, don’t go crazy. Let me show you wireframes and storyboard for part of an app I’m working on this week.
Context: I am designing a way for people to create an update, like on Twitter or Facebook.
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Your immediate goal is to get the product built right.
But what you really want to do is get your organization aligned on the customer
experience.
How?
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What’s my point?
When you go to the field, profile users, and build personas, you’re gaining incredible
insight into your customer base.
Bring your developers and management along on this journey!
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If you can’t physically bring them to the field, share what you’ve gleaned from the field
back at the office:
Hang it on your walls & boards Make “persona placemats” and leave them in
the lunchroom Put persona or profile “posters” in every
meeting room
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Visit your customers in their environment! Profile them, make personas and tell their stories.
Storyboard their stories with wireframes. Get your organization to really understand the customer….not just the market or the product!
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Paul Sherman Sherman Group User Experience www.shermanux.com [email protected] Twitter: @pjsherman
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