2021-11-22 - Personas - Behaviors Before Roles

4/7/22, 07:44 2021-11-22 - Personas: Behaviors before Roles
2021-11-22 - Personas:
Behaviors before Roles
Nov 22, 2021 - Led by Jared Spool
Avoiding generic one-size-fits-all solutions.
When thinking about users, it’s easy to gravitate to roles. The users of an
education service might be students, teachers, and parents. A healthcare product
might serve patients, doctors, and nurses. It’s easy to think this way, but it’s also
remarkably unhelpful.
The problem with these generic role-based personas is they imply that everyone
in a given role approaches the product the same way. That all teachers work the
same. That all doctors need the same capabilities. It pushes us into a one-
solution-fits-all approach that only gets us into trouble.
In this session, we’ll discuss how personas work best when we start by
understanding what our users do with our products and services. Jared Spool will
lead a discussion into the subtlety and nuance we need to craft truly effective
designs that meet the needs of users and customers.
Before the talk gets started:

https://centercentre.notion.site/2021-11-22-Personas-Behaviors-before-Roles-42ca234491324cb4a44509b73136e237 1/10
• How this discussion will go:

◦ 20 - 30 minutes short presentation on today's topic.
◦ Remainder of the time will be spent discussing your questions.
▪ Please put your questions in the chat.
▪ Please change your Zoom name to your actual name.
▪ Colin Young will collect the questions and pick the ones we'll answer
today.
• Things to keep in mind with Zoom:

◦ If the little Chat pop-ups get distracting, feel free to open the chat window.
◦ Please put your microphone on mute.
▪ If Colin chooses your question, you can unmute to talk about it with
Jared
◦ Zoom's Speaker View will let you keep Jared visible and you'll see what
he's presenting on the screen.
◦ This session is closed captioned.
We will post the recording for this session within a day.
Today’s Notes
Many teams create personas to represent gross roles amongst a collection of

users.
For example, a company making education products might have these
personas:
• Students
• Teachers
• Parents
• School Administrators
Another company making software for insurance companies might classify
these personas:
• Policy holders
• Insured family member
• Insurance brokers
• Underwriters
• Claims agents
• Claims adjusters
One could easily imagine different functionality, UIs, workflows, and even entire
software applications for each of these user roles.
Making sure we're covering all bases is an important function of personas.
However, role-based personas have a limited half-life of usefulness.
They cover the early stages of a design.
However, once they are usually too broad and general to assist with details in
the design.
One issue is they imply that each user classifies as a single role.
And that each user in a given role will use the design the same as all other
users.
All teachers will use the design the same way.
All students will use the design the same way, though differently from all
teachers.
Unfortunately, this rarely turns out to be true.
People's use of sophisticated products and services rarely fits into simple
descriptions of scenarios.
Personas have real power for the team.
They can be helpful on a daily-basis to truly understand user needs.
They can help us communicate the subtlety and nuance that makes our
problems challenging.
They can inform our solutions in ways that can delight or users.
We can measure experiences on a scale of extreme frustration to extreme delight.
Resolving frustration is a subtractive process.
We keep modifying the design to remove the elements that frustrate users.
They are usually frustrated because we missed expectations and didn't
meet their needs.
Delight, on the other hand, is an additive process.
We need to add elements that exceed the users's expectations and
anticipate their needs.
Delighters can come in three forms: (Dana Chisnell's model)
Pleasure: Designed elements and features that satisfy needs and exceed
expectations.
Flow: Optimizations in the workflow or interaction model that dramatically
simplify the experience.
Meaning: Creating opportunities for the user to delight others through our
product or service.
Designing for pleasure means identifying small opportunities for exceeding users'
expectations.
This is the easiest approach to designing for delight.
Are there places where we can bump up the interaction to pleasantly surprise
the user?
Have to remember to think long-term versus once.
Designing for flow means looking for places where tool time can be eliminated.
Goal Time: The percentage of time a person is working directly on their goal.
Tool Time: The percentage of time a person is working on things other than
their goal.
Examples of tool time: Training, onboarding, or entering information the
computer already knows.
Tool time is about reducing expected friction.
Designing for meaning means identifying and surfacing how using the product
delights others.
This is the most difficult for designing for delight.
We need to understand what is meaningful to others.
This involves diving deep into the stories people tell others.
Designing for delight means upping our research efforts.
Basic usability testing won't be sufficient to understand expectations and how
to exceed them.
We'll need more advanced forms of research to learn where there are
opportunities for pleasure, flow, and meaning.
When we conduct more extensive research, we can better define our personas.
We can focus on the behaviors we see during the research.
We can define the personas to show the differences in the behaviors.
We can see what the expectations are for the specific behaviors.
We can anticipate the users' needs when they execute the behaviors.
We can focus on the designs for each specific behavior.
Behavior-based personas have a much longer half-life of usefulness.
They give the team a shared understanding of the subtlety and nuance in the
users' experiences.
They help us deliver best-of-class user experiences, because we're focused on
the details.
Our products and services feel higher quality to users.
We're exceeding expectations and anticipating needs.
Upcoming Talk UX Strategy topics.

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4/7/22, 07:44 2021-11-22 - Personas: Behaviors before Roles

Before the talk gets started:

• How this discussion will go:

• Things to keep in mind with Zoom:

We will post the recording for this session within a day.

Many teams create personas to represent gross roles amongst a collection of

Upcoming Talk UX Strategy topics.

Starting Your Journey to UX Leadership

Establishing Powerful UX Metrics that Showcase Your Work

Securing an Internal Champion for Great UX

Get Unstuck: Advanced Approaches to UX Research

Leaders of Awesomeness Events Calendar.

The Center Centre UX Strategy program.

The Center Centre UX Strategy program

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