Website User Experience Design
Using Scenarios and Personas to Understand Your Customers' Needs
Oct 3, 2007
Often when designing its website, a business takes the time to define its business requirements but not the time to map those requirements to functionality that supports the customer. User experience designers can work with a business to help map the customer’s needs to the website and in turn to the business requirements. One way they do this is by defining personas and creating scenarios that walk the business through the customer's experience to achieve their goals.
Personas
A persona is a description of a person that defines a target user group for the business. The best way to define a persona is to talk to real customers. You should attempt to define one for each target group (try to minimize the number of personas to focus on the primary target groups you want to reach). Here’s an example of a persona for a financial services company:
- Jane Masters, 35 years old, 3 children all in grade school
- Works full-time as a research assistant making a decent living
- Separated from her husband
- She has a small RRSP fund, but no real savings
Define Key Goals
Along with a clear description, a persona needs to have a context (“I want to…”), an outcome (end goal) and assumptions (i.e. a limitation, or expectation). In the case of our persona Jane:
- Context: I want to my children to go to university
- Outcome: To have a financial plan that saves enough money to pay for university tuition for all three children
- Assumptions: Her husband isn’t able to contribute to any college fund
Scenarios: Focus on Activities that help achieve these goals
The key to a good user experience is to build a lasting relationship between the business and the customer. You do this by focusing on activities that will help your customers achieve their goals. To do this, walk through a scenario for a persona and see where they require your assistance to move toward their end goal. Start by defining the activities they might do, and then identify touch points where they interact with your business (i.e. web site, instant chat). Next think about the services your business can provide to help them and what underlying databases and applications you need to provide those services. To start the scenario for Jane, it may look like this:
- I want to research financial plans for college funds…
- Uses Google to search “financial plans for college funds” and one of the results points to an article on your website…
- I want to know what things I need to think about for college funds…
- She reads the article and clicks on a link for a planning calculator…
- I want a calculator that is easy to understand and use…
This is just a small part of a scenario example. It describes the activities Jane is doing and the supporting services the business is offering to help her. This example is very high level.
Scenarios Cover more than Websites
Defining scenarios for a customer is about more than just designing a web site, it is about all the ways they can interact with your company. It’s the entire cross channel experience and you need to ensure it’s seamless. By creating personas and defining scenarios, you can see how you need to design your website to meet the needs of your target groups and how that website is interrelated with the rest of your business communication channels. A website does not stand alone.
