No website or intranet design decision you make is going to please every user, every time — nor should it. When you’re creating an optimal user experience for your target audience or audiences, their needs and preferences take priority. While some general usability principles apply for virtually all audiences (the design needs to be usable, useful, desirable and adoptable), it’s essential to understand how your user groups respond to the interface and information architecture.
Developers have a number of ways to represent audience research and analysis, including user stories and usage scenarios. One useful method, especially when developing public websites, is to create user personas that represent your key audience segments.
A well-written persona serves as shorthand for the insights gained through user research. An effective persona, according to Usability.gov, represents the goals, background and values of one of your major user groups, and expresses their main needs and expectations when using your site.
Here are a few ways personas help you create a great user experience for your target audience:
- Personas help developers empathize with end users: Instead of trying to design in a vacuum, a persona gives designers and developers a person to respond to when making decisions and specific user needs to keep in mind when solving user experience problems.
- Personas provide insight into broader user paradigms and expectations: Certain kinds of audiences are more familiar and comfortable with different kinds of interfaces and devices. If you use personas to sketch out a user group’s online habits and preferred devices, you’re better able to design interfaces that match that group’s expectations and understanding of web functionality.
- Personas help different departments focus on users instead of business objectives: Personas are a great way to distill research in order to determine whether a business goal or need actually solves a user problem, keeping projects on track. The personas are easily understood by people from a variety of different departments, making it easier to determine whether or not what they’re working on ultimately satisfies some actual user need on the project.For example, if the team that designs the interface and the team that creates the site content have different ways of thinking about users, that’s likely to cause a disconnect when the actual users come to the site. By doing good user research and writing effective personas, you’re able to improve internal communication and work toward common goals.
While global navigation and search models have broad implications for all users, no website or intranet you create is going to please every user, and not every design decision has a substantial impact on every audience. It’s important to look beyond the basics and think about what functionality and preferences are most important to your primary audience, and that’s why user research and audience analysis is so critical in developing a good user experience.
Effective personas serve as intuitive, easily understood representations of your target audience that help to unite development teams and keep projects focused on what matters most.
Learn more about creating the right SharePoint user experience for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
