Designing for Personas

with Andy Bright

30thMar '10

About the event

Your organisation is developing a new online service. It simply has to be successful. Your competitors have been adding customers and cutting-costs through their web services for years now. How can you ensure your new system meets the needs of your broad audience?

Claire is a 23 years old and has just graduated with a masters degree in Engineering. She's worried about finding a job before her savings are exhausted.

Tim is a recently retired 68 year old. He has built up a wealth of unique knowledge over his career and is now thinking about offering consultancy services to businesses in his sector.

To design effectively for our users we need to know who they are.

Using user research to build composite characters called personas we can define and communicate a deep understanding of our audience, and give our teams the knowledge required to produce a design which is truly focused on supporting user needs (and improving our chance of success).

In this presentation we will:

  1. Analyse the difficulty of designing effective user interfaces
  2. Introduce the value of user research and of developing user personas
  3. Investigate ways to generate personas that effectively communicate user requirements
  4. Critique the short-fallings of user personas and discuss how they can be overcome

At the end of the session you'll have the knowledge, tools and templates necessary to introduce user personas in to your and your teams designs.

More about the speaker(s)

Andy Bright is a Glasgow-based experience architect and passionate evangelist for user-centered design.

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previous events

2011
HTML 5 and its impact on Usability
An Introduction to Prototyping
Engaging industry and the public sector in accessible, inclusive design - do we need to shout louder or smarter?
A Virtual Seminar: Mobile Design: Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps
Student attitudes towards mobile library services for Smartphones
2010
Persuasion Architectures: Nudging People to do the Right Thing
Web Analytics + Usability = A Sum Greater Than Its Parts
Agile and Usability
Modeling the mobile user experience
A virtual seminar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences
Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries
Designing for Personas
Mementoys - usability in product design
2009
Mobile Usability / iPhone App
Election Ballot Usability
Online Qualitative Research - new ways to find out what consumers really think
Prototyping - the landscape and review of Axure RP Pro
Improving Website Usability Using Google Website Optimiser
Web Accessibility update - new guidelines and standards for web accessibility
Designing for Dyslexia
2008
Building the Usability Profession
Exchange of Ideas: Agile/XP and User Experience
Comparative Usability Evaluations: Usability testing vs Expert evaluation
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
Scottish Usability Showcase
Sub-groups, Deviants and Navigational Alignment: Advanced topics in card sorting
The Perpetual Super-Novice
Label placement in forms (and other time-consuming forms controversies)
Implementing usability changes on an already successful site
2007
Games Usability
Scottish Usability Showcase for World Usability Day
Interactive TV usability: Is the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) dead?
Choosing the right technique - the right answers to the right questions
An Award Winning Usability Programme
Usability in the travel industry
Writing for the Web
Designing and Evaluating Mobile Applications for New Social Experiences
University Showcase - Usability research projects from Scottish Universities
Usability and SEO - pulling in the same direction?
Scottish Usability Showcase 2006
2006
Usability standards, the Usability Maturity Model and what they are good for
Everything you've always wanted to know about card sorting
Content Management Systems and Usability
Web Accessibility Primer on WCAG 2.0 and Including Users with Disabilities
Making search a good user experience
Presentation on usability testing software
2005
Web analytics and usability
Usability in government websites
Usability and accessibility with tomorrow's web technologies
Scottish Usability Showcase on World Usability Day
Information Visualisation
Conducting International and Cross Cultural User Research
Web accessibility
Ethnography in the 21st Century
Child centred design and computer games
Delivering a Usable Experience with Rich Internet Applications
The Power of Hindsight
Eyetracking presentation
Thinking Big - Creating usable enterprise portals
Interactive TV usability and accessibility
Insights into Information Architecture for the web
2004
Web accessibility - presentation and demonstration
Handheld Usability
Usability and Public Technology - The complexity behind the simplicity