UX Designer

@ jatheon.com

Marko Aleksic

www.markiz.io

What is

User Research?

Chapter I

Donald Norman

Jakob Nielsen

User Research helps you to understand users so that you can respond more effectively to their needs.

It focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

User Research Techniques

What is User Research

• Personas

• Use Cases

• Usability Testing

• Heuristic Evaluation

• Individual Interviews

• Contextual Interviews

• Surveys

• Focus Groups

• Card Sorting

• ​First Click Testing

• Task Analysis

• System Usability Scale

• Prototyping

• Parallel Design

What are Personas and why do they matter?

Chapter II

Persona is a reliable and realistic representation of a type of customer. It answers for whom we are designing for.

Personas are only as good as

the research behind them.

Who are your users?

Who are your users?

Helps you group them

User Personas benefits:

Builds empathy towards the User throughout all organization

Is a starting point to all other research techniques

Develops focus and aligns teams to the same track

Makes and defends decisions

Reduces discussions about edge-cases and prevents appearance of an "elastic-user"

Prevents designers to design for themselves

Helps having majority of user-types satisfied rather having all users feeling meeeh with the product

User Personas are not:

An one-time task
 

Thing that is not changeable through time
 

Designer / Marketing team exclusive

Something that all team members will accept by default

Replacement for talking to real users

How to Create a Persona?

Chapter III

How to Create a Persona?

01  Conduct research and interview people

02  Find patterns in responses and group similar people

03  Create archetypical models (candidates pool)

04  Validate, iterate and use minimal number of personas

05  Share findings and promote personas in your organization

06  Revisit them

Elements of a Persona

Chapter IV

Name

Photograph

Social and demographic characteristics (age, gender, location, job, education...)

Needs, desires, goals

Habits (consumer, behavior)

Cultural background

Expertise (internet, computer, smartphone)​

Motivations

Expectations; Frustrations

Experience Goals

Persona Questions

Chapter V

• What is the age, gender, education, etc?
• What do you do for a living? Why?
• How much work experience you have?
• Describe your typical day or week?
• What are your typical needs and desires?
• What are your likes? Dislikes?
• Do you have any hobbies?
• How much time do you spend browsing the web and where?

• What devices do you use and why?
• How long have you been using computers? And smartphones?
• What's your favorite brand?
• Why are you using our product?
• What is your goal in the product?
• What do you like about the product? What frustrates you?
• What would you like to do more?

Proto-Personas (Lean)

vs Personas

Chapter VI

Proto-Persona

What is

Low time, low budget

Rapid development, stakeholders not interested

Completely made up and not validated

Better having a proto-persona than not having any

Persona Candidates

Chapter VII

How to dig material for your personas?

Chapter VIII

Interview Stakeholders

Where to look?

They talked to users in the beginning

Need to be aware who their users are

Need to understand why Personas are important

Look for patterns

Create a pool of persona candidates

Talk to Marketing and Sales teams

Where to look?

They interact with possible users

Probably have their own user profiles they use for marketing

Can sum what hundreds of users think (patterns)

Widen or enrich you persona pool

Talk to Support Teams

Where to look?

They interact with frustrated users mostly

You can find out what users try to accomplish

Find out what is frustrating users

Can sum what hundreds of users think (patterns)

Help you further enrich your persona candidates

Check Support Tickets and Chat Logs

Where to look?

Look for patterns in behavior, attitude, goals

Helps you understand how users communicate

Understand pain points of product and organization

Online Surveys

Where to look?

Incorporate into your product

Small number of questions – lots of answers

Ask only the most important ones

Check Analytics, heatmap tools and recordings

Where to look?

Users devices, locations, gender, time spent...

See how they use product

Identify rarely used and not needed elements

Interview Users

And most importantly

Find out who they are, validate your personas

Widen your knowledge, understand their goals

Ask questions you couldn't get answered before

The more users you talk to the more correct persona will be

Always look for patterns

Validate and Iterate

And don't forget to

Validate and Iterate

Validate and Iterate

Validate and Iterate

Validate and Iterate

Validate and Iterate

How, Where and When to Apply a Persona?

Chapter IX

– A Wise Man

Create a Persona

of this event

Exercise

Age:

Gender:

Education:

Job:

Technology:

Interests:

Goal: 

Persona Name

Age: 25

Gender: Male

Education: College

Job: Designer

Technology: Experienced Smartphone User, Experienced Desktop User

Interests: Photography, Travel, Tech, Startups, Design

Goal: To gain more knowledge and use it on his own projects or at work

Tobias the Gray

How Personas Change Over Time

Chapter X

Users get more tech-savy

Business target audience shifts

 People develop new habits

Questions

The End

Marko Aleksic