Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points.

Goodwin, Kim. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Got Usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has brought usability to the attention of the general public, but within the user experience community he's been criticized by those who say he emphasizes a view that excludes other dimensions of user experience. So is he the defender of ease-of-use or the enemy of creativity?

Thornton, Chad. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First

Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Usability

How Little Do Users Read?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

How to Embed Usability and UCD Internally

Integrating usability into any organisation can be a difficult and isolating experience. Get the lowdown on how to achieve this within your organisation.

Ismail, Ismail. Webcredible (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

The Human Interface

The phrase 'human error' is taken to mean 'operator error', but more often than not the disaster is inherent in the design or installation of the human interface. Bad interfaces are slow or error prone to use. Bad interfaces cost money and cost lives.

Dix, Alan. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability>User Centered Design

IDEO's "Ten Faces"

Tom Kelly's latest book 'The 10 Faces of Innovation' internal personas are used to help illustrate traits critical in building an innovation culture.The Experience Archtect is included.

Armano, David. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Information Engineering for the 21st Century  

Bowie urges technical communicators to spend less time creating documentation and more time designing products that people can use intuitively.

Bowie, John S. Intercom (2003). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design>Usability

An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them

There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution.

Calabria, Tina. uiGarden (2005). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Involving Customers in Developing Usability Metrics  

Usability metrics are standards to measure a product against and are critical to finding out whether the product is successful in the areas that are important to its users. You can miss critical observations during a usability test if you do not use metrics to test the product. This is especially true if you are testing a product for the first time and do not know what the test will uncover. This paper describes how to find out what users want out of your product and develop usability metrics through focus group and contextual inquiry research.

Hammar, Molly. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability

Issues in Sizing UCD Projects

Sizing UCD projects presents special challenges to usability practitioners and consultants. Each project and UCD methodology comes with its own set of variables that makes it difficult to accurately estimate resource requirements and completion times.

Usability Body of Knowledge (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Project Management

The Kind of Documentation Users Really Want

Have you ever asked your users what kind of training materials they want, or how they prefer to learn software? This kind of information is critical to figuring out what help deliverables to produce. But really when it comes down to it, there are only so many options — printed manuals, short guides, interactive flash guides, videos, online help, live training, reference cards, context-sensitive help, workbooks and exercises, or, usually the favorite, someone to stand by their computer and answer questions whenever they need help.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design

Listening to the Learners: A Case Study in Health Information Website Design  

An important mantra of user-centered design is to 'know thy user.' Accomplishing this requires one to decide what should be known about the user and how to gather the information. In this paper, we focus on the specific instance where the user is a learner. Specifically, we describe our efforts to listen to the learners of an information website, the Arthritis Source, and to act on this information.

Turns, Jennifer and Tracey S. Wagner. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Scientific Communication>Usability

Little Machines: Understanding Users Understanding Interfaces    

This paper questions the ubiquitous practice of supplying minimalist information to users, of making that information functional only, of assuming that the Shannon-Weaver communication model should govern online systems, and of ignoring the social implications of such a stance. Help systems that provide fast, temporary solutions without providing any background information lead to the danger of users completing tasks that they do not understand at all. (Word will help us write a legal pleading, even if we have no idea what one is.) As a result, we have help systems that attempt to be invisible and to provide tool instruction but not conceptual instruction. Such a system presents itself as a neutral tool, but it is actually an incomplete environment, denying both the complexity and alternative (and possibly improved) modes of thinking about the subject at hand.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Journal of Computer Documentation (2001). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Usability

Low-Fidelity Prototyping for Technical Communicators  

Technical communicators are responsible for a great deal of what the user sees and touches. This means that more technical communicators are becoming integrated members of product design teams, bringing their expertise into the group and taking the lead in designing and evaluating their information systems, Creating low-fidelity paper prototypes of software for customer feedback sessions is an effective methodfor gathering valuable user input early in development.

Rauch, Thyra L., Dana L. Gillihan and Paul Leone. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Making Research-Based Design Decisions: What is the Best Way to Get User-Centered Research Results to Practitioners?

There are about 1,000 usability-related articles published each year. My guess is that less than 5% ever have any practical, long-term value to most usability practitioners. In some cases, the topics being studied are of little interest to practitioners. In many cases the research results are simply too hard for practitioners to find.

Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2002). Articles>Publishing>User Centered Design>Usability

Making Use of User Research

By focusing on how a product performs in the lab without broader knowledge of the user's environment and goals, measurement alone may be misleading. To get the most value and meaning out of user feedback it is important to choose the appropriate method for conducting and analyzing user research.

Anderson, Gretchen. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

The Myth of "The User"

Instead of becoming computer users, like the cheery protagonists of Star Trek, we've become the computer used, like the gloomy inhabitants of Dilbert.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Indus (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Navigation: Left is Best

Web sites and Web applications require users to select from navigational options to access subsequent content pages. An important question relates to where the first navigational choices should be located on the page. Is the navigation better placed at the top of the page, on the left or right panels? If three clicks (i.e., three navigational level selections) are required to get to the desired content, should they be grouped together at the top, left, right, or split between different locations (e.g., select from the top, with the next selection[s] from the left, top or right)?

Bailey, Robert. Usability.gov (2006). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

New Technical Writer: Use the Persona to Create the Most Useful Section of Your User Document

A good User Document includes sections on how to set up, use, and care for the product. However, to create a great User Document, the technical writer should use the Persona, generated in the analysis of the User/Reader, to create the topics for the most useful section of the User Document. This article describes this procedure.

Millman, Barry. Article Alley (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions

As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. It's the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview. The questions asked are at the heart of any interview. Following are a loose set of guidelines to help you frame questions in a way that elicits honest and accurate responses.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Usability

Of Mice and iPods, or The Death of the Designer

Computing technologies are becoming so familiar it can feel as if they have always been here. It is strange to think that the mouse, for instance, was invented by Doug Englebart in the seventies. He must encounter a degree of incredulity when he mentions this to people. “You invented the mouse? Really? How nice. Did you also invent the pen?”

Blythe, Mark. uiGarden (2008). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>Usability

OOBE Project: A Case Study in User-Friendly Hardware  

Many people can't even program their VCR, let alone set up a new PC. As part of an industry-wide response to this problem, Epson America came up with the Users Digest. We hoped it would grab users' attention and hold it long enough to get them up and running without calling tech support. This paper relates the history of the User k Digest andprovides a guided tour of this innovative document.

Bergen, Karen A. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>User Centered Design>Usability

The Origin of Personas

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Had personas been developed in the laboratory, the full story of how they came to be would have been published long ago, but since their use developed over many years in both my practice as a software inventor and architectural consultant and the consulting work of Cooper designers, that is not the case. Since Inmates was published, many people have asked for the history of Cooper personas, and here it is.

Cooper, Alan. Cooper Interaction Design. Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas

Perfecting Your Personas

It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them.

Goodwin, Kim. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Personas