Communicating the User Experience

A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation

Richard Caddick, Steve Cable

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781119971108
• eBook ISBN: 9781119972044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

A clear and focused guide to creating useful user experience documentation

As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you'll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world's best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.

• Explains how to create documentation that clearly communicates the vision for the UX design and the blueprint for how it's going to be developed
• Provides practical guidance that you can put to work right away on their own projects
• Looks at the new UX tools and ideas that are born every day, aimed at helping you do your job better and more efficiently
• Covers a variety of topics including user journeys, task models, funnel diagrams, content audits, sitemaps, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and more

Communicating the User Experience is an ideal resource for getting started with creating UX documentation.

Chapter 1: Personas

A persona is a document that describes the ways in which certain types of people will use your website. Usually one persona is created for each type of user. Personas are used to show you the goals that users will be trying to achieve on your website. See Figure 1-1.

In this chapter, you will learn exactly what information is needed to create a truly useful persona. You will learn the best time in which to produce your personas, what information needs to be communicated, and how to lay it out in a clear and concise way. You will also get some ideas on how to generate the information that is needed to create a solid persona that is based on real people.

Figure 1-1: A persona helps you understand users' goals when using your website.

What makes a good persona?

A good persona is based on real people and solid research. It focuses on the key goals that user groups have to achieve, user behaviors, and user attitudes while completing their goals.

Ultimately, personas need to help you understand if any decisions you make will help or hinder your users.

When to create a persona

To put it plainly, you should create one now. Unlike wireframes or prototypes, personas don't fit into a specific part of a single project process. Instead they help guide every part of every project. They provide a quick reference for design decisions, idea generation, and strategic changes.

Personas and task models sit closely alongside each other and are built on the same types of research, so for efficiency the two can be developed side-by-side—this also allows you to consider different personas based on the task models.

Personas should be living documents. They capture a snapshot of an audience at a specific time. As further research uncovers new insights, your personas need to be updated to reflect them. Doing so turns the personas into an ongoing strategic tool that constantly represents the user behavior and uncovers new opportunities.

What are you communicating?

A persona has two goals:

> To help you make design decisions.

> To remind you that real people will be using your system.

A good persona is not based on demographics or stories; it's based on the tasks, behaviors, and attitudes of your users. For example, if you're developing a vacation reservation site, your personas shouldn't focus on what newspapers users read, what cars they drive, and what the measurements of the inside of their legs are. This information doesn't help you develop your product. Avoid irrelevant information; focus on key goals. This helps you imagine how people will use your product—and that helps you make it more useful to them.

Use short descriptive bulleted points

Avoid stories. Don't get me wrong, I love stories, but not in personas. The problem with stories is it's difficult to write them well and people won't take the time to read them unless they are incredibly engaging. Keeping your persona content down to short sentences and bullets creates less effort for the reader.

Base personas on real people

Personas should be based on real people from real research. A good way to ensure this is to use somebody you met during your research as a base for your persona. Choose somebody who is a fair representation of the persona and then add in any other relevant pieces of information you found in your research. This means your persona shows a fair representation of the group it's representing but uses real examples that you have really experienced.

Use descriptive photography

Photos can be a really valuable part of a persona, but more often then not they are used really badly. Mostly photos are used to put a human face against the persona, so a cheesy smiling portrait is stuck at the top of it. Photos on personas can do much more than that.

The right photo can tell the reader something about this user group just from looking at it. For example if one of your personas has a hard time using technology, then the photo should be of someone struggling to use technology. Photos in your personas should reflect user behavior, not just age and gender.

Avoid using stock images. They are tacky and make your personas feel less real (real people don't stand in studios with cheesy grins). Ideally you want to use photos of real users who you encountered during ethnographical research (explained later in this chapter). Photos of real users performing relevant tasks will help ground your personas in reality. Of course this is not always possible. An alternative is to use an online photo sharing site like Flickr. These have a wealth of candid photos of real people in real situations. However, you need to be aware of the licensing that is associated with the images and may need to seek permission from the photographer before you use them.

Figure 1-2 shows an image from a persona for a shopping site.

A nice addition is to include a photo of the personas' environment. If you show the space that they inhabit while trying to use your system, you might come up with some interesting ideas of their behaviors and constraints. It could tell you if they work in a messy environment that is full of distractions. It could show you the kinds of devices they use: laptops or mobiles. It could show you any other resourc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Personas
• Chapter 2: Task Models
• Chapter 3: User Journeys
• Chapter 4: Content Requirements
• Chapter 5: Sitemaps
• Chapter 6: Wireframes
• Chapter 7: Usability Test Reports
• Chapter 8: Funnel Diagrams