William Hudson •  Consultant, teacher, writer, designer

•  > 40 years experience in the development

of interactive systems

•  > 30 articles and papers

“The simplest and the most obvious way of creatinga

good product or service is to create something, that

you need yourself. This will allow you to create

something you perfectly understand and you will have a

clear idea if that is smth valuable from the beginning.”

37signals

Deep understanding of user’s needs

is crucial for building a successful service

•  Direct engagement with people

•  Understanding of contexts of use (empathy)

•  Understanding of goals and tasks

User Human-Centred Design

Research

•  User observation

•  User Research

•  Industry

•  Сompetitors

•  Additional needfinding strategies

User Observation

•  What do people do now?

•  What values and goals do people have?

•  Types of context

•  The importance of being curios

Choosing Participants

•  Representative of target users

•  May be current users of a similar system

User Research

•  Qualitative

o  Representative of target users (8-10)

o  Ethnographic

•  Quantitative

o  Large number of respondents

o  Questionnaire

Approximate better that nothing (may not

be ideal, but better that nothing)

Affinity Diagram

•  A business tool used to organize ideas and data

•  Process:

o  Record each idea on cards or notes

o  Look for ideas that seem to be related

o  Sort cards into groups until all cards have been

used

Personas

•  Personas provide empathy

•  Strong psychological evidence for personal bias (Our

brains are wired to empathize with individuals rather

than groups)

Without Personas

•  Low empathy

•  Technology focus

•  Featuritis

•  Time scales

•  Narrow scope

•  Ignorance/bliss

Persona

•  Name, age, demographic details

•  Photo

•  Primary goals, motivations and begaviours

•  Related pain points

•  Give the persona story to tell

Primary & Secondary Personas

•  Primary personas represent behaviours that define

your product or service (customer checking in)

•  Secondary personas have relatively minor differences

in goals, motivation or behaviour (manager)

Personas Summary

•  A persona is the face of a user community

•  These are used for

o  Recruitment (research and usability testing)

o  Sales and marketing

•  Use case and user story

•  Merchandising

Use Cases and User Stories

User Stories vs Persona Stories

•  Before

o  “As a customer I want to see a list of available

flights to make a booking”

•  After

o  “Bob views available flights to make a booking”

The main difference is that personas

describe researched (not fabricated)

behaviours

Persona-weighted feature matrix

Persona 1 Weight=50

Persona 2 Weight=30

Persona 3 Weight=20

Weighted Priority

Feature 1 2 2 -1 140

Feature 2 2 1 1 150

Feature 3 0 2 2 100

Weight = 1 to 5 or % that add up to 100% Score = ●  -1 hurts the persona ●  0 persona doesn’t care either way ●  +1 helpful to the persona ●  +2 persona LOVES this feature! It’s a must-have!

Design Map •  Who

o  Personas

o  Persona‐weighted feature matrix

•  What

o  Use Cases

o  Persona Stories

•  How

o  Customer Journey (Design Map)

o  Wireframes, Sketch

Be creative and have fun!

Books

•  Alan Cooper (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

•  Don Norman (2009). Design of everyday things

•  Tim Brown (IDEO, 2012). Change by Design

•  Goodwin, K. (2009). Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human‐Centered Products and Services, John Wiley & Sons

•  Hudson, W. (2013). “User Stories Don’t Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories” in Interactions Magazine, Nov‐Dec 2013, ACM. www.personastories.com