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...
As personalization has become increasingly possible on intranets throughout the years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of sites that provide an “out” to personalization, often for troubleshooting purposes. One concern with personalization is that it results in an experience that differs
Remember that for personalization to work, you must have the content to deliver to those roles. Content creators can struggle to select the right target audience(s) for content when the divisions of users are too fine grained. Personalizing by broader characteristics, such as location, department
Because I used Liste Rouge Paris as a bad example under Mistake #1a, I thought I'd play nice and use them as a good example here. The tailor offers 15 different collar styles (among many other options) for people ordering custom-designed shirts. Luckily, they also provide good defaults for each of
Crypto Micropayments: An Exciting Future of Blockchain Transactions
There are plenty of transactions that occur which could benefit from the security and speed of blockchain, from making secure in-store purchases and the buying of tickets to events like sports matches and concerts. Blockchain also gives us a much-needed layer of confidence in keeping age-restricted
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
Look past digital currencies’ nosebleed pricing volatility, and you’ll discover a robust, decentralized, secure database. Brands and technologists are quickly figuring out how to put this powerful ledger to good use. Here are several real-world examples that demonstrate cryptos’
Freewheeling Freelancers will Dominate the Future Jobs Market
Today, if you need a 2,500 in-depth article about a niche aspect of your industry you only need to look online, and in a matter of clicks, you could be in touch with an individual in possession of all the required knowledge that’s willing to complete your piece. This sort of freelance
Marking Required Fields in Forms
Login forms are short and traditionally composed of two fields: the username and the password, both of which are always required. If you’re using the asterisk, the cost of marking these fields as required should be minimal, so you cannot go wrong. However, most users have encountered many, many
why personas fail
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Airbnb makes it easy to satisfy the needs of these travelers by connecting them with owners who want to make an extra dollar by renting out their property. Before Airbnb, sites such as Home Away and property-management agencies used to connect owners with interested renters, but these were focused
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Why is it important to understand the components of brand, and to differentiate brand from its common misinterpretation as simply a logo, a figurehead, or a website, among other things? Only when all three brand components — visuals, tone, and behaviors — are present and true to the core brand
Web Research: Believe the Data
Unfortunately, there is still too little publicly available research on Web usability. Some proprietary research exists and I am gratified by the growth in the number of companies that are running their own studies. But we also need published results since many of the findings do generalize. For
The State of Transactional Email
Even though transactional messages are typically sent after the user has placed an order, these messages have substantial business value in improving customer satisfaction. They can increase the likelihood that the user will place another order in the future. Each email is another touchpoint on the
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
Notice that this quality of good links is last in the list. Concision is important, but it must be balanced with the other priorities (specific, sincere, substantial) in link-label writing. There is no maximum word count for links. They can be as long as they need to be to achieve those other three
WP Engine Named a Great Place to Work in Ireland
Almost three years ago, WP Engine expanded its global presence and opened a second international office in Limerick, Ireland (our first was in London). Known as a city where technology and culture collide, Limerick has been the perfect location for WP Engine to grow and evolve. At its start, the
why personas fail
StudioPress Theme Spotlight: New Breakthrough Pro
As we continue to showcase a sample of the amazing StudioPress themes now available to WP Engine customers, we’re extra excited to bring you this new StudioPress Theme: Breakthrough Pro, which is the first new theme to be launched since our acquisition of StudioPress in June. Breakthrough Pro
A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look at newly released products, like our Global Edge Security offering in partnership with Cloudflare, as well as a deep-dive into our recent acquisition of StudioPress. To wrap
UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve
The number of story points can fluctuate over time depending on the team’s workload, but try to address at least one or two UX-debt items per sprint, preferably more if bandwidth allows. Use easy-to-understand visualizations, evidence from user testing, and clear explanations of what was
Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design: How the Trend Slowly Makes Users Less Efficient
Young adult users seem to rely heavily on hovering as a strategy to determine clickability. When asked how she knew what was clickable on web pages, one user said, “By scrolling over it … then you know. Otherwise I actually don’t know. Some stuff you assume. But it’s nice when links are
Test Paper Prototypes to Save Time and Money: The Mozilla Case Study
The designer made the prototypes using OmniGraffle, and we printed them onto tabloid paper and cut them to size. Because there was no code to change, this prototyping method allowed us to make design changes quickly during testing. Firefox users helped progress the designs rapidly toward better
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
8 predictions for the future of IoT in 2017
As IoT gains momentum, the volume of data generated will be stratospheric. Not only will there be more data, but there will be different types of data, and data from sources that have yet to be considered. Big Data analytics will evolve into a distributed analytics model, which will help with the
The 3 Biggest Threats Healthcare Data Security is Facing Right Now
The year 2017 suffered the greatest ransomware attack in the history of the internet. The WannaCry ransomware detected in hospitals of the UK. It then exploded across the globe and affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries. This attack targeted the computers running with the
Purpose, Balance and Interface Are Keys to Successful Teams
That’s why our team developed Spoka Meet. We’re delivering a scalable solution aimed at meeting the changing needs of fast-paced small businesses, startups and elite teams to help them drive change and results. Our hope is to help them interface better and more efficiently, both internally and
why personas fail
3 Free Banking Apps for Entrepreneurs
The app allows business owners to attach their bank accounts and credit cards and customize their dashboard instantaneously. Wave offers double-entry accounting and organized tracking to help entrepreneurs get ready for tax time; entrepreneurs can also invite those who help them manage their books
JS-Kit Score: Turn Your Site into a Localized Digg
Widget provider JS-Kit has released their latest widget this morning, Score. Score adds a thumbs up/thumbs down-style ratings widget to any page content, and then aggregates the data across the entire web site into an info box that can highlight a site’s top content. It can also integrate
Why Personas Fail | Store Finders and Locators
Store Finders and Locators
Many of the websites we tested in Studies 3 and 4 included the option to use current location to begin a search. The majority of study participants allowed access to their current location when the site requested it. Some desktop users did not notice the browser popup requesting their location
Flat-Design Best Practices
Google’s Material Design, which has been around since 2014, took an admirable stab at this concept. The best thing about Material Design was that it defined a carefully considered framework with specific rules, behaviors, and visual properties. Unfortunately, it’s not always implemented
Are Chinese Websites Too Complex?
Many usability problems in this China study duplicated findings from our testing of Western sites with Western users. For example, users had trouble with the carousel on Tsinghua University’s website. As one Chinese user said, “On the page with different pictures from Tsinghua, I didn’t know
