User Centered » Personas

Lesenswertes vom 27.07.2010 | User Research Edition

Lennart — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:50:41 +0000

User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models | UXmatters
"[T]his article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis."
Three Important Benefits of Personas | UIE Brain Sparks
"As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams produce better designs, we’re still constantly surprised by the number of teams successfully using personas. With personas, teams report that they are producing more usable designs that better match the needs of their audience, increasing the satisfaction of their users."
Tips for Effective Storyboarding | ANidea
"In this article you will learn how to create storyboards and present them. At the bottom of the post you’ll find free storyboard templates available for download."
Interviewing Users | Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
"[I]nterviews are in fact an appropriate user research method — if you use them only in the few cases for which they generate valid data."

(via delicious.com)

Personas, der Comic

Lennart — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:46:45 +0000

→ How to Understand Your Users with Personas

Nutzersegmentierung für UX

Lennart — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:05:42 +0000

Steve Baty stellt in seinem aktuellen Artikel bei UX Matters eine Reihe von Modellen zur Nutzersegmentierung vor.

So far, the practice of UX design has focused primarily on the persona as the model of choice. This article explores alternative ways of segmenting audiences and the design research we need to derive each type of model.

Neben Personas beschreibt er sechs weitere Herangehensweisen und Analysemethoden um an die dazugehörigen Daten zu kommen:

(...)
Weiterlesen... (198 words)

Financial Times wirbt mit Nutzertypen

Lennart — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:55:10 +0000

Über die Werbung für den Relaunch der Financial Times Deutschland Seite bin ich im Spiegel gestolpert. Die Finanical Times wirbt damit, dass sie ab jetzt verschiedene Startseiten für vier unterschiedliche Nutzergruppen (Klassiker, Schnellleser, Meinungshungrige und Hingucker) anbieten.

Hier ein Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung zum Relaunch:

FTD.de präsentiert sich ab sofort mit innovativem Startseiten-Konzept. Vier verschiedene Startseiten bereiten die wichtigsten Informationen aus Wirtschaft, Politik und Finanzen individuell für unterschiedliche Nutzertypen auf. [...]
“Das Konzept ist konsequent vom User her gedacht. Die Ausgangsfrage war: Welche Nutzertypen hat FTD.de und mit welchem spezifischen Interesse steuern sie unsere Seite an? Nach dieser Analyse haben wir die Startseiten-Struktur entwickelt.”

Das ist das erste Mal, dass ich jemanden mit “Personas” Werbung machen sehe. Weiter so…

Lesenswertes vom 10.09.2009, Personas – again

Lennart — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:00:08 +0000

Heute gibt es schon wieder Links zu Persona Artikeln, liebe Zielgruppe. Nachdem es gestern Pro-Argumente und Beispiele für Personas gab, habe ich heute ein paar kritische Stimmen und Hinweise zur Persona Erstellung für Euch. Viel Spaß damit und ab morgen gibt es wieder andere Themen. Versprochen!

Personas? |37signals
"We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels."
Personas and Innovation | Experiencing Information
"Personas are a way for designers to conceptually deal with a hetergenous target group. They build the necessary empathy for the user to allow us designers to “communicate” effectively with them through our designs. [...] Personas may also lead to solutions that are more readily adopted by the target population."
Design without personas | FeraLabs
"There are many heated discussions to be found on the subject on the IxDA mailing list, with many different arguments for and against personas. Here is our take on it. We don’t use them. Instead, we use real people!"
Persona Development and the Law of Averages | ClickZ
"Creating profitable personas shouldn't be a mysterious process, but neither is it simplistic. It involves a practical application of science, customer research, psychology, and customer empathy, which already exists in most successful sales processes. First Step: Avoid the Averages."

(via delicious.com)

Lesenswertes vom 09.09.2009 – Über Personas

Lennart — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:46:17 +0000

How to create personas your design team will believe in | userfocus
"Does your organisation use personas to describe users' characteristics, goals, needs and behaviours? Although they are a popular tool for communicating knowledge about users, many personas are little more than anecdote, hearsay and rumour. These kind of fake personas rapidly fall into disuse. Make sure your own personas get used by validating them against this 7-item checklist."
Persona Format | Fluid Project Wiki
"This persona format was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas. The format chosen was based on the competitive analysis of many persona examples below."
Download an example persona used in the design of a web application | Chopsticker
"Despite a wide-ranging interest in personas (aka user profiles) by web and software designers, concrete examples of actual personas are surprisingly hard to find. So I’m happy to contribute an example here[ ...]."
Build Your Own Data-backed Personas | sitepoint.com
"We’d always been aware of personas as a design tool, but we’d never used them at SitePoint. However, we’ve been doing some thinking lately about the future of sitepoint.com and we decided to give it a go."
Building a Data-Backed Persona | Boxes and Arrows
"In practice, outcomes indicate that designing with any persona is better than with no personas, even if the personas used are entirely fictitious. Better yet, however, are personas that are based on real user data. [...] Web analytics provides a rich source of user data, unique among the forms of user data that are used to evaluate websites, in that it represents the users in their native habitat of use."
What’s My Persona? Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character | UXmatters
"Designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters."

(via delicious.com)

Bitte um Mithilfe – Umfrage über Persona Einsatz

Lennart — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:20:45 +0000

Lene Nielsen, die Autorin des Artikels 10 Steps to Personas braucht eure Mithilfe, liebe Zielgruppe:

We, at Snitker & Co., are conducting an international personas study aimed at companies who have used personas in their work. If you have experience with using personas, we would kindly ask you to help us and fill in the questionnaire.

10 Steps to Personas

Lennart — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:00:34 +0000

→ Lene Nielsen – 10 Steps to Personas

(Den dazugehörigen Artikel unbedingt anlesen…)

Über die Wirksamkeit von Personas

Lennart — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:30:20 +0000

Hier der Link zu einem Paper, in dem versucht wird die Wirksamkeit von Personas bei der Produktentwickung nachzuweisen.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims).

Nette Idee, aber was mir nicht gefällt ist, dass die entwickelten Lösungen ausschließlich mit Nielsens Usability Heurisitics bewertet wurden. Auf diese Weise wurde nur die generelle Benutzbarkeit der Lösungen bewertet, aber die Eigenschaften der Hauptnutzer und den Nutzungskontext, die sich in Persona-Beschreibungen widerspiegeln, wurden somit nicht betrachtet.

Trotzdem bietet der Artikel eine gute Einführung in das Thema und liefert einen recht Überblick über die dazugehörige Literatur.

→ Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design