Virtual Floorspace » personas

When is ethnography the best design research method?

Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:01:32 +0000

Ethnography is the best research method to use when you need to discover the fundamental factors that influence the customer experience. Not the attributes of a given design, but the underlying framework that determines the quality of the customer or employee experience. Ethnography takes you to the source of the experience, and gives you tools to discover the most impactful factors.

Another situation that Ethnography deals with especially well are when you are seeking innovative design solutions for daily life situations. Ethnography is a structured approach for leaving behind current solutions and going back to the life context that the design serves.

Another situation in which ethnography is uniquely capable to provide answers is when the key concepts involved in an activity are not yet well defined or operational. For example, suppose we are trying to design a mobile app and one of the key success factors is convenience. Convenience is not a simple concept. It involves location and time and fulfillment. Until we can break this concept down into operational or observable components, we are stuck with a vague notion of what we need to do to succeed. Ethnography helps discover and operationalize concepts like convenience.

Of course, the bottom line is, that the value of the research has to outweigh the expense.

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Ethnography 101: What makes it an Ethnography?

Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:34:44 +0000

5. Maps depict the activity domain, with representation of key actors, sites, artifacts, and behaviors.

When conducting ethnographic studies, Usography researchers sketch out a map or diagram of the observed space, whether it is a store, an airport, or an area of a home. The most significant elements of the environment are represented either literally or conceptually. Flows that represent activities or processes are designated by arrows or other directional visual elements. The map can be a snapshot in time, but more typically interactions and physical paths are timed and represented as a holistic view over time. We usually include a few codes at the bottom of the interaction maps that indicate common types of behaviors or expressed emotions, such as consulting a salesperson (S) or acting frustrated (F).

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User Archetypes vs. Personas

Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:06:23 +0000

I was on a design strategy project recently for a top-tier retailer for which an agency had developed dozens of personas. The personas weren’t differentiated by behavioral attributes or measurable characteristics, only by their ages, personal stories, and features they were (purportedly) likely to use. The persona printouts were plastered all over the walls, but with time the ink had faded. The team told me that these personas had taken a serious amount of time (and budget) to develop, but were never used to guide design. This exercise obviously gave personas a bad name in that company.

Another national retailer I consulted with also had had personas created for them. I was tasked with creating profiles for the most valuable online customers, and create a design strategy with these profiles as a guide. One rule stated plainly at the outset: Don’t mention personas and don’t put that word in the deliverable. The senior management team wouldn’t endure another project with personas.

How did this perception of uselessness, and even outright hostility toward personas develop? Nearly a decade earlier I worked on a personas project for a leading company in the photography products and services industry, the team loved the personas. They brought them up in every major conversation where design issues were debated. They remembered their names for months during a massive new product effort. I still remember their names. What was different?

I think it was a matter of the foundation on which the personas rested. In the first two examples I used, the personas were simply personal, plausible stories that were invented on the basis of what was known about customers from anecdotal evidence. They were constructs that could not be measured or disagreed with. They were very logical and well-organized, and were used by their creators to propose numerous features and design changes. But they were hollow. The photography company, on the other hand, had decades of data that they were able to attribute to the personas. They knew these people from a numbers perspective, how many pictures they took, what they did with the pictures, how likely they were to produce new picture artifacts, etc. The personas were clearly segments of their target audience and they knew how many people those segments represented.

Despite my initial positive experience with personas back in the 1990’s, I promote a different, but related, construct to my clients these days, that of user archetypes. Some agencies use the terms personas and user archetypes interchangeably, but I think of them rather differently. The distinguishing aspect of all personas that I have read about in the popular literature is the individual identity and the matching personal story that involves the interactive domain in question. What distinguishes user archetypes is that they are archetypical, meaning they are the quintessential or most frequently observed example or universally understood type.

I have been in quite a few persona-creation sessions. The methods vary widely, from the most whimsical to others that match specific data points of interest. User archetypes, on the other hand, by the nature of being archetypal must rely on data of some sort to achieve that status. Reading through the popular design resources, I haven’t found a common understanding of how user archetypes should be developed, so I will describe the steps in the Usography process for creating user archetypes. Note that the steps described below are for the largest e-commerce projects with the biggest budgets for research. For smaller projects, we combine many steps and use the best available data. So each of the following steps is contingent upon the scope, goals, and budget of the project.

Consult existing research
Conduct ethnographic study or in-context interviews
Determine needs, motivations, activities, resources, artifacts, etc. that are involved leading up to and following use of the web site in question.
Determine the variables and higher-order concepts that impact behavior
Use scales to characterize users more precisely
Determine the range of values for all key variables in the population of users studied
Look for qualitative evidence of correlations and dependencies between variables
Create profiles that summarize values of these variables for actual participants
Group participants based on shared characteristics and behaviors
Create a user archetype profile that represents each distinct group.
Measure the variables that define and differentiate the user archetypes in the population of interest more precisely using quantitative methods
Finalize and prioritize user archetypes based on anticipated value to the company
Develop a design strategy to engage and support each of the top priority archetypes.
Track results, and refine the model

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Using Personas to Guide Web Design Strategy

Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:43:17 +0000

Personas are fictitious users of a web site who are representative of a segment of real users. Presumably, personas are created from customer or market data, thus enabling designers to consider the needs of their most frequent and/or most important customers during the concept and design phase of large, costly projects.

Below is an example persona that was created to represent a segment of mobile phone customers. (FYI: This persona is partially based on Gizmodo’s iPhone demographics article, and was uploaded to the ixda discussion group in answer to a post).

Name: Christine Martinez

Age: 31

HHI: $82,000

Location: NYC

Education: Bachelor’s degree, Communications

Job title: Human resources generalist

Marital status: Single, involved in medium term relationship

Internet IQ: High

Shopping IQ: High

Adoption segment: early majority, fashion forward

Primary goals related to cellphone purchase: Email access, web browsing, car safety

Most relevant features: Touchscreen, Pandora access, voice activated dialing, social media app integration

Drivers: Convenience, customer service, cost of phone+data plans, in-sync with trends

Loyalty: High, despite frustration, does not want hassle to switch.

Favorite web sites: Zappo’s, Amazon.com, Hotels.com, woot.com

Internet profile: 2 hours per day, non-email internet usage

Technology profile: Dell laptop (provided by job); iMac at home; iPod touch; iPhone 3G

Social media profile: Averages 45 minutes per day on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, delicious

Favorite TV shows: Dancing with the Stars; Grey’s Anatomy; Men in Trees

Reading now: Ad Age, Ad Week, BrandWeek, Outliers, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Characteristics that impact purchases: Tracks deal web sites like woot.com and , always searches for coupons, willing to spend to not appear out of touch, does not monitor bills

Business value: Periodic high impulse spend despite cautious purchase patterns; refreshes technology every 2 years; open to fashion add-ons

Purchase barriers: What she reads has a big impact on purchase decisions. Negative remarks in Twitter or other social media interpreted as fact. Depends heavily on smart search feature to find products. Wants to see how she or home will look with product, so she often won’t buy until her friends have it.

Purchase Tunnel Dropoff: Difficulty viewing total price before purchase, lack of clear arrival date, lack of clear return policy, better deal on similar item that has same appearance value

Requested content/features: High-level comparison that includes discounts, feature demos, toll-free customer service that is in USA with phone number on web site home page

Switch behavior: Low-switch behavior. Unlikely to switch complex services unless she feels customer service has cheated her. For non-complex switch situations, e.g. cable TV, will switch when she sees an ad with clearly superior pricing and equivalent feature set. Unlikely to switch for features.

Quotes:

- I am on a mission. I go to the Internet with a specific purpose in mind. I don’t browse around for no practical purpose (except Zimbio and YouTube)

- I want to see what other people say about it before I make a decision. If a product is good, it will be popular.

- I don’t trust those companies you never heard of before.

- I don’t want to start from scratch every time I go back to a web site. I like stores and web sites to remember me, the ones I trust, that is.

- I bought it at Best Buy because I had a 10% off coupon

- I don’t like a lot of marketing noise. I don’t trust it and when I see a lot of mixed marketing messages it makes me think that they are desperate and confused about what they are selling.

Method for tracking this customer type with web analytics:

- Entry through marketing campaign on affiliate site that has content targeted to 30 yr. old single female

- Purchases fashion accessory that has higher than average price

- Views many photo pages, does not view many detailed specs pages

- Responds to clickthrough articles and ads with fashion and appearance as main topics

- Search terms: most popular, best deal

Typical purchase scenario:

- Sees ads on TV and billboards

- Sees friend with product

- Google search

- CNET review

- Discussion forums (professional, technical)

- View in store

- View cost breakdown

- Search for coupons, deals

- With a discount, on occasion when she feels prosperous, takes the plunge, buys 2 or 3 accessories to make product look better

Experience gaps:

- Product links from Facebook pages of friends to catalog

- Realistic visual cost meter on services

- Customer service guarantees

- In-store video product details mixed with humor, popularity, and deals; accessible on web site for replay

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Written by Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts