Personas are my jam. I teach a full-day training course on them: what they are, why they work, how to create them, and how to use them to do great work. I love teaching this course because personas are one of the most abstract components in the very analytical discipline that is UX. I love demystifying this abstract topic, making it concrete, and addressing common pitfalls that practitioners encounter.
Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of a cluster of your target users who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviors in relation to your product. They’re human-like snapshots of relevant and meaningful commonalities in your customer groups and are based on...
Journey maps should result in truthful narratives, not fairy tales. Start with gathering any existing research, but additional journey-based research is also needed to fill in the gaps that the existing research won’t cover. This is a qualitative-research process. While quantitative data can help
Despite the many downsides, we still recommend a heavy dose of direct manipulation for most UIs. Direct manipulation often enhances users’ sense of empowerment over the computer by letting them feel that they are in control and are the ones making things happen. The upsides of DM usually enhance
While speedy response times are best, there are simply times when even a server upgrade won’t allow you to comply with the guidelines for system speed. In these cases, you simply must reassure the user that the computer isn’t out for lunch but is working faithfully on their request. If the
Navigating Big Data’s Fake News Problem
While this is a good start, there are many issues with this system, such as people flagging content because they don’t like it, limiting them from seeing news which will contradict their worldview and hurting publications needlessly. This solution also doesn’t address the big data
Cross-Platform Scaling: The Way Forward for Businesses on Blockchain
In an official statement on cryptocurrency and blockchain, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton noted, “The technology on which cryptocurrencies and ICOs are based may prove to be disruptive, transformative and efficiency enhancing. I am confident that developers in fintech will help facilitate capital
IoT solution to supply chain management
Visibility is arguably the biggest gain that IoT provides for SCM. Companies will be ‘in the know’ of everything from the start of the product lifecycle till customer purchase. This will provide the necessary insight needed for making better business decisions. For FMCG companies, this
Split Buttons: Definition
While a split button may seem like an obvious design pattern, options within the menu can have low discoverability. Users (especially those learning an application) don’t always recognize this pattern, so they may not notice the secondary menu button and, consequently, the options located within
and why personas fail have
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Take Uber for example. While the experience is hugely popular and generally pain free, there is room for enhancement — especially for large groups travelling together. Currently, a group must problem-solve in order to figure out how many “ubers” to call and and how many passengers can fit in
Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation
Based on these observations, it’s clear that left-aligned logos are better than centered logos for supporting user navigation to the homepage. Note that the left-logo sites in this study still caused some homepage-navigation errors (although far fewer than the centered-logo sites). This is
4 Noteworthy Intranet Design Trends in 2019
Ignoring or rebelling against using the intranet are learned behaviors that were reinforced by repeated poor experiences and infectious word of mouth between colleagues. (Learned helplessness is a well-documented phenomenon: once somebody has been beaten down enough times, she gives up trying
UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or
How to use Screening Questions to Select the Right Participants for User Research
However, open-ended questions alone are not enough to ensure effective participant screening, because they have some critical limitations. If you are recruiting for a very specific niche behavior, an open-ended question may fail to elicit relevant information because some people who do engage in
Gutenberg—Believe in the Beauty of Your Dreams
Despite concerns that Gutenberg would launch too early, that simply hasn’t been the case, and in recent months a herculean effort has gone into checking a considerable subset of the most-used plugins to make sure they’re Gutenberg-compatible. An equally heavy lift has been undertaken by
different why personas fail were
Recapping the State of the Word 2018
Navigation menus help add organization to your website. Transitioning menus to have Gutenberg functionality will allow users to edit menus inline. Mullenweg said that experimentation would be required to master this but an idea would be a restricted number of blocks that could be arranged into
WP Engine: 2018 in Review
New year, new you, did you say? Well, that was our reality in 2018 as we rolled out some of our favorite new platform additions. We took the lead on the Amazon Polly plugin, the first plugin to bring voice technology to WordPress. The WP Engine Digital Experience Platform continued to evolve and
UX Stories Communicate Designs
A critical success factor for UX work is how much confidence it gains from stakeholders — from developers, to product managers, to executives. UX stories help tremendously when aiming to persuade because they transcend expertise and bias. They enable everyone to understand and agree on common
Which UX Deliverables Are Most Commonly Created and Shared?
This suggests that noninteractive wireframes tend to be artifacts that UX professionals produce for their own benefit, whether as a natural part of their design process, or for use in usability testing, but those same people don’t frequently share them with others. However, interactive prototypes
Why Personas Fail
A failed persona effort is often the largest barrier to future success. Those who have seen them fall by the wayside without having any meaningful impact on a project often write them off as a silly waste of time for the rest of eternity. You will have to work hard to convince these skeptics that
The Business Benefits of Visualizing Your Data
It’s pretty obvious that, over time, you’ll build up an incredibly large store of data and information. Much of this storage of data you may believe has no use for you. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean your data storage needs to sit on a hard drive or server collecting digital dust
As Digital Identities Evolve, Data Security Should Too
Though that might sound a bit abstract, I think we can look at it as an evolution of identity. Not only that, but it’s a type of personality that’s more conducive to innovation, especially in an increasingly automated digital world. For instance, dating apps like Bumble allow users to connect
The Way Forward: Responsibly Deployed Facial Recognition
With the advancement of machine learning and more specifically, pattern recognition, facial recognition technology can be overlayed onto camera feeds to prompt action where appropriate. New use cases for this technology are willfully adopted on a daily basis. You can already unlock your phone and
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
cluster why personas fail customers
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
The hardest thing about the re-design was integrating the tableless CSS design into Radio Userland. I had to do some jiggery-pokery with the Radio Userland templates and macros, and the CSS implementation is not yet complete. I’ve had to temporarily remove my blogroll and topicroll, along
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
Why Personas Fail | Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
With this kind of comparison table implementation, you’ll be able to control how the information is displayed on the page. For example, you can change the copy to fit the space constraints of one cell. Note, however, that this implementation is not as easily scalable as dynamic comparison tables
Best Practices for Homepage Links on websites
To minimize homepage-navigation confusion, offer both clickable logos and actual Home links. These Home links can be presented in places such as the site’s global navigation or in breadcrumbs. Positioning them towards the top left of the page (above the content) makes them the most discoverable
Visibility of System Status
Modern systems are often complex, and it is unreasonable to assume that all the variables that describe the state of a system can be communicated to the user. Many backstage components, such as what JavaScript files are downloading and executing to make a site work, are of little interest to users
