Over the years, I’ve built many websites. The most successful projects always started with a good plan. Who was the audience, is there special things that they will be looking for, what are they going to need to do.
With one recent website I worked on a large number of their clients were older, wore glasses, and were not always computer illiterate. As such, we worked on creating a simple navigation scheme, and used larger text that would be easier for people to read and use.
Another website I worked on was used by a lot of “techies” so we created RSS feeds and implemented things which that crowd would feel comfortable with.
When we know our end user, we can create a persona for them. By listing things about them, we started to think about how they would want to use the site, and work to make that easier. It should also be noted that a website might have several types of users.
Take this example, for a website offering in person tutoring to middle and high school students. The end user is most likely not going to be the student, but a concern parent. For them you might have a user persona of:
Carol: Parent of teenager. She is afraid of her child falling behind and doing poorly in school. She sees a failure of her child as her own, and is afraid that her child will fall into the “wrong crowd” if they don’t pull their grades up.
Bob: Parent of teenager. Sees better grades as a necessity so his child can play in sports. Bob is a big supporter of the local school football team, and wasn’t great at school himself, but was able to get by. Thus he cannot help his child himself, but he see’s his child having an opportunity to play ball in college and that scholarship would make life easier.
Now if you look at these two, you’ll notice a couple of things. 1) They are generic. Bob and Carol could have been any name, but you’ve probably seen them. Maybe you could see yourself as one of these people, either already if you have kids, or in the future when you have kids. 2) They have different reasons for wanting their kid to do well.
Can you see advertisements for these two parents. Maybe one in a parenting magazine, the other in a local sports section? Advertisers use buying personas all the time. You can also use them to help you design your website. Maybe it will be from picking images to place on the website, highlighting a “hero” button to make certain services easier to find, or tweaking design elements, like I did when I knew most of my users were older and making the text and buttons larger would help them from getting so frustrated.
Creating Persona’s to Better Design Your Website was originally found on Access 2 Learn
