User Needs & Personas
To ensure your website engages with customers, it’s important design teams have an in-depth understanding of what a user will expect when they arrive on your site. Without this, a website will be designed based on your, or the design team’s own, preconceptions.
Design teams that adhere to this process will provide your customers with a thought-through user experience that will keep them engaged with your site as well as ensuring that they come back time and again. This can be the key to gaining an edge on your competitors.
Why use RedEye?
Success starts with understanding. To begin to design an effective website you must have an in-depth understanding of your prospects lifestyles, attitudes and most importantly, their online behaviours and needs. Since 2000, RedEye’s specialist usability division optimum.web has been helping companies understand online user behaviour.
At RedEye we use a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to unearth deep insights into online user behaviour. The results can deliver very wide-ranging benefits and reveal unpredicted user expectations. Depending on the stage at which this research is undertaken, it can provide robust evidence to:
- establish or validate a project business case;
- secure stakeholder buy-in;
- confirm and prioritise user types;
- inform the development of user personas;
- determine range and scope of content and functionality;
- identify gaps in content and functionality;
- identify potential USPs for your site;
- enable learning from your competitors’ successes and failures;
- identify the preferred look, feel and tone;
- ensure the website reinforces brand values;
- prioritise your development / enhancement activity;
- inform success measurement;
- inform your marketing programme.
The detail…
Separating user needs from a list of user ‘wants’ and then prioritising these, is a critical component of truly effective user needs research. At RedEye, we have developed a bespoke process to achieve this.
Typically, we find that many of the things users say they ‘want’ to be able to see or do on a website, in fact reflect one or more of the same underlying ‘needs’. When we separate real ‘needs’ from ‘wants’ and prioritise those ‘needs’, we can avoid the inclusion of superfluous, non-critical features and functionality. To address the unique objectives and issues of individual client projects our approach to user needs research is always bespoke, drawing on a variety of methodologies.
Traditional focus groups
Typically run over 1.5 hours with 6-8 participants all of whom are professionally recruited to a specially devised brief. Sessions are moderated to a pre-agreed discussion guide and supported with stimulus material where appropriate.
HCI groups
Typically 6-8 participants in a 2-hour session that blend individual, task-based, qualitative and quantitative usability evaluations with focus group style discussion.
Depth interviews
Conducted on a one-to-one basis, in person or by telephone, with selected representatives of key audience groups.
Quantitative online surveys
We design, deliver and analyse both online and email surveys.
Quantitative telephone surveys
Carried out amongst a sample of sufficient size to produce statistically significant data across the requisite range of user types.
Ethnographic studies
A purely observational (i.e. non-discursive) methodology used to gain insights into how target audiences behave in their own work or home environments. It provides a unique, ‘lifestyle’ perspective on the usage of interfaces and other methods of information sourcing and is carried out either through live observation or remotely, using ‘fly on the wall’ filming.
Building Personas
The mass of in-depth data collected from the above research techniques can be overwhelming, especially to design teams with little knowledge of research techniques and terminology.
To make the data easier to absorb, we create a series of typical user descriptions that encapsulate offline lifestyle and character features, together with online goals, attitudes, motivations and behaviours.
These one-page descriptions then become reference points that can be referred to as the site is developed to ensure that development is on track.
Since good personas are based on real data and are carefully designed to draw out important differences in attitudes and behaviours, they are also useful to client teams who are responsible for sourcing or developing new products and services.
