Understanding Users to Drive Adoption for Your Product

Jesse E. Owens II

Senior Product Manager, Digital Payments @ MasterCard

My Journey

  • B.S. in Computer Science, Norfolk State University
  • 12 years in B2B and B2C product development experience
  • Military Defense, Investment Banking, Education & Payments
  • Self-taught UX Design, Web & Mobile Development

Workshop Outline

  • Why We Need to Understand Our Users
  • Identify User Personas
  • How to Craft User Personas
  • Product Redesign from User Personas
  • Q & A 

Good Design

  • is innovative
  • makes a product useful
  • is aesthetic
  • makes a product understandable
  • is unobtrusive
  • is honest
  • is long-lasting
  • is thorough down to the last detail
  • is environmentally friendly
  • is as little design as possible

Dieter Rams, 10 Principles of Good Design

what is Cognition?

is what goes on in our heads when we carry out our everyday activities that involve thinking, remembering, learning, daydreaming, decision making, seeing, reading, writing and talking.

Don Norman, author of Design of EveryDay Things

Experiential:  how we perceive, act and react to events around us.

Example: driving a car or reading a book

Reflective: thinking, comparing and decision making.

Example: new ideas and creativity

 

Who are our users?

  • B2C (Business to Consumer)
    • Age Demographics
    • Financial Status
    • Cultural
  • B2B (Business to Business)
    • Size
    • Category
    • Customer Base 

What are their habits?

  • B2C (Business to Consumer)
    • Social Media Usage 
    • Web vs. Mobile Browsing
    • Streaming Preferences
  • B2B (Business to Business)
    • Operations
    • Reporting
    • Data

When are they visiting?

  • Morning
  • Mid-Day
  • Evening
  • Weekday or Weekend
  • Ad-Hoc

how are they accessing the product?

  • Desktop
  • Tablet
  • Phone
  • Laptop

User Personas

User Personas are communication tools used to define and understand a target user base for your product . They help drive product development efforts to focus on your key users rather than building for the whole world.

  • Types of Personas include:
    • Marketing:  contains demographic information, buying preferences, social media habits etc
    • Proto-Personas: product pre-launch, no budget to conduct formal research and educated guess of your target user will guide development
    • Design: user goals, opportunities, pain point and current behaviors

 

Data for User Persona

  • Surveys
  • Focus Groups
  • Usability Testing
  • Product Analytics

Once you have all of your data, it’s time to analyze and extract common trends / themes that will lead to key drivers for the development of your product.

How to Craft User Personas

  • Visualize your ideal customer that aligns to the data collected, not your imagination
  • Biographical information (name, age, gender, location, income, etc)
  • Highlight the Goals , Need, Frustrations of your target customer
  • Produce a narrative that gives an intuitive summary of your customer

Value of User Personas

  • Management of Feature Requests
    • Every time a customer makes a request, the design changes.
  • Concise Customer Narrative
  • Team Alignment on Design
    • Remove the "self" perscribed design approach
    • Avoid Scope Creep of your User​​​​

Examples of User Personas

Create Your Persona

  • Go to Music Discovery Results
  • You’re creating a set of personas to redesign Spotify's discover feature
  • Using the data from the user survey, try to extract trends and develop 1-2 personas
  • Be ready to share!

Spotify Discover Feature (Desktop)

2016

2014

Key Points to Consider

  • Recommend music is based on likes, follows and recent music listening history
  • Each recommendation allows the user to follow or listen to the artist directly
  • Most of the recommended artist are musicians that already exist in playlist which defeats the concept of music discovery
  • The sorting of the recommendations aren't clear in terms of the relevance

Spotify Discover redesigned

 

  • Incorporate feedback from survey and current discover feature functionality
  • Provide recommendations on how to improve the discover experience from your user persona(s)
  • Be ready to share!

Resources


  • Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by John Wiley & Sons
  • Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  • The Practitioner's Guide to User Experience Design by Luke Miller

Contact Me

@JesseOwensII

Jesse Owens II

@JesseEOwensII

Thank you !