Great products address the real needs of real people. Many companies risk bringing products to life without hearing customers' needs because their design teams don't have a way to bring the customer "inside" where product development happens. UX designers use personas to represent real customers so the design process focuses on addressing real user needs. When design teams take advantage of personas, they see faster development times and better quality products. The entire team is on the same page and the designs satisfy users’ goals. In this presentation, you’ll learn methods for performing user research in the field, synthesizing the results and communicating user needs to your internal product team. Specifically, we’ll cover techniques for interviewing customers, defining problems in the form of clear, concise problem statements and drafting user personas.

1. Personas: Where Product
Meets User Needs
CHRISTINE PERFETTI PERFETTI MEDIA @CPERFETTI

3. Agenda
• Greet the user
• The five steps for persona
creation
• Planning a persona project
• Running the user research
• Exercise: Conducting a user
interview
• Analyzing the data
• Writing your persona
descriptions
• Integrating personas into your
development process
• Q&A

4. Prevents grounding

5. Encourages storytelling

6. Improves the product and marketing process

7. Increases empathy

8. The five steps for creating your personas
• Step 1: Plan the persona project
• Step 2: Conduct a user research study
• Step 3: Analyze the data
• Step 4: Write persona descriptions
• Step 5: Integrate personas into the development
process

9. 1. PLAN THE PERSONA
PROJECT
Getting Your Team Onboard

10. The planning meeting
Hold a persona kickoff meeting
• Provide an overview of the research and persona process
• Discuss and finalize research focus questions
• Review product issues and concerns
Who should attend:
• Product and UX
• Engineering
• Marketing
• Sales, Support, Customer Success representation

11. Involve all stakeholders

13. TODAY’S PROJECT
EliteVacation.com

15. Focus questions for interviews
• What is the typical reason for users’ travel? Business / vacation?
• How do users go about planning for a trip? How do they plan for a
trip that is a vacation?
• What degree of research do users conduct before booking a
vacation? What type of information are they looking for?
• To what degree are vacation travelers interested in packages?
Would they prefer to customize their vacations?
• What factors go into the purchase decision?
• To what degree is price a consideration when users book their
trips?
• How flexible are users on their schedule? Is it fixed or flexible?
• Does users typically travel alone or with others?
• To what degree is trust of the brand a consideration when booking
a trip through a web site?

16. 2. USER RESEARCH
Gathering Insights to Inform the
Product

17. User research

18. Contextual interviews in the field
‣ Excellent technique for gathering insights about users’
goals, needs, desires and motivations

19. The interview: What we learn
• User frustration and problems
• How technology fits into users’ life
• Domain knowledge
• Level of technical expertise
• User goals and most important tasks
• User preferences and attitudes

20. Logistics
• Typically takes 1-2 hours at the users’ site
• If it’s not possible to meet onsite, we use a remote
meeting tool, such as WebEx or GoToMeeting
• Equipment
• Video or audio recorder
• When approaching the interview take the mindset of an
Apprentice
• The user is the expert

21. The art of the interview
• Use body language and encouragers
• Ask for clarification, when necessary
• Summarize key points
• Use open-ended questions to collect information without
leading the user
• Use close-ended questions to take control of the
interview

22. Things to avoid
• Avoid leading questions
• Users like to respond with a “yes”
• Beware:
• Do you like this feature? [INSTEAD: What are your
impressions of this feature?]
• Would you be willing to pay more than $500 for this
vacation package?[INSTEAD: What factors go into
your decision making when deciding on a package?
What degree is price a factor?]

23. EXERCISE
Draft Your Interview Questions

24. Review your focus questions
• What is the typical reason for users’ travel? Business / vacation?
• How do users go about planning for a trip? How do they plan for a
trip that is a vacation?
• What degree of research do users conduct before booking a
vacation? What type of information are they looking for?
• To what degree are vacation travelers interested in packages?
Would they prefer to customize their vacations?
• What factors go into the purchase decision?
• To what degree is price a consideration when users book their
trips?
• How flexible are users on their schedule? Is it fixed or flexible?
• Does users typically travel alone or with others?
• To what degree is trust of the brand a consideration when booking
a trip through a web site?

25. Exercise: Write your interview questions

26. Sample questions to ask
• How frequently do you travel?
• What is the typical reason you travel? [Business / personal].
• How frequently do you take vacations?
• Please tell me about a recent vacation you took. [Delve into the
focus question details.]
• How did you plan for the trip?
• How much research did you conduct before booking the trip, if any?
• What are the two things you liked best about the experience?
• What are the two things you would most like to improved?
• How much flexibility do you typically have when making your
vacation plans? Why?
• What are the most important factors that contribute to your ideal
vacation?
• What factors do you consider before booking a trip?
• To what degree is the ability to customize a trip a consideration for you? To
what degree is price a consideration when you book your vacation?

27. EXERCISE
Practice Your Interviewing Skills

28. Exercise instructions
• Break into groups of 2
• Interviewer
• Spend 5-8 minutes interviewing the user
• Take notes
• After 8 minutes, switch roles

29. The interview template
Source: http://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/using-personas-for-executive-alignment/

30. 3. ANALYZE THE DATA
Synthesizing What You’ve Learned

31. Identify key user behaviors and attributes
• Write up summaries of each interview
• Identify behavioral attributes of users
• In what way are the users the same? Different?

32. Identify important user behavioral attributes
• Examples:
• Price sensitivity
• Degree of research required to book trip
• Need for customization of vacation
• Flexibility of travel dates
• Travel alone or with many people
• Frequency of business versus personal travel

33. Create scales

34. Example: Map the users to the scale

35. Look for patterns (1)

36. Look for patterns (2)

37. 4. BUILD YOUR PERSONAS
Write Your Persona Descriptions

38. Persona descriptions: Topics to cover
• Name
• Photo
• Tagline
• Attitudes and preferences
• Domain and technical knowledge
• User goals
• A day in the life / scenarios

39. Scenarios
• Short stories about a person using you
product to accomplish their goals
• Describes what they would do and why they
would do it
• Independent of interface
• Gives the context in which its used

40. Analyze the date: Start with a persona for
“Ezra and Lizzie”

41. Persona example

42. 5. INTEGRATE YOUR
PERSONAS INTO THE
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

43. Workshops

44. Email the personas and user descriptions

45. Posters: MailChimp

46. Integrate personas into your development
process
• Integrate personas into requirements documents
• Create the personas before requirements
• Write user stories based on the personas needs
• Integrate personas into regular design reviews
• How would X persona tackle this scenario?
• Conduct assessment of product UI and marketing
materials from the lens of the persona

47. QUESTIONS

48. THANK YOU!