1. Setting the scene
This week’s theme – 'who are our users?' – has been particularly pertinent in both my academic and professional life. While I’ve continued to synthesise my research findings for my project, thinking more deeply about my prospective users and creating tools to help me articulate their needs, I’ve also been carrying out a kind of ‘discovery’ phase to help me get to know my key partners, collaborators, and stakeholders in my (still fairly new!) role as a UX Writer.
Starting with the professional side of things: I began the work week feeling a mixture of overwhelmed and uncertain about how I could best contribute my skills and knowledge to the area I’m working in. I was questioning the value I could bring and trying to think of solutions and ideas that might benefit my teams. However, after speaking with several colleagues, I started to see how I might be better off viewing the situation through a UX lens: before I could come up with solutions (i.e. figure out how I could best help), I first needed to understand the problem space (i.e. speak to, empathise with, and identify the needs of my users – i.e. my colleagues).
To frame it as a problem statement: as a new UX Writer, I needed to carry out research to understand my co-workers’ pain points so that I could understand where I could best apply my (writing) skills to generate positive outcomes for my teams, our customers, and the wider business.
1.1. Depth of insight: enhancing my practice – user interviews and affinity mapping in the workplace
So far this week, I’ve conducted 6 ‘user interviews’ with Product Managers, UX Designers, and my fellow UX Writers (with a further 7 lined up for next week) to get a better understanding of the areas I’ll be working in, as well as my colleagues’ needs and goals. I’ve started to create an affinity map to help me synthesise the key themes and insights, and I’ve already been able to identify several key areas where I can see the potential for positive change.
Applying the user research techniques and methodologies I’ve been learning as I get settled in my new company has helped me gain some much-needed perspective. Shifting my mindset from ‘I must find solutions now!’ to ‘I need to understand the problem space first’ has allowed me to start crafting a much clearer overview of the current situation – and also provided some great opportunities to refine my user interview technique.
1.2. SMART goal: continue to seek out opportunities to apply my academic learnings ‘in the wild’
Now that I’ve seen the positive impact of adopting a UX mindset while getting to know my new colleagues and their needs, I want to practise applying more of the tools and methodologies I learn throughout the rest of the module to my professional practice.
For each work project I take part in, I'd like to conduct similar mini-interviews with each stakeholder to understand exactly what we’re trying to achieve in terms of customer needs and business objectives. I can then write up a brief but engaging ‘single source of truth’ and present this to all key stakeholders for mutual approval, to ensure that the entire team is aligned on our (including my individual) key objectives.
2. Creating personas
2.1. Breadth of analysis: exploring key skills and domains – persona creation
Back to my UX Design project: following on from the user interviews and secondary research I conducted last week, I created a user persona to bring my insights together and give me a clear focus for when I begin to make more concrete design decisions over the coming weeks.
Having created user personas as part of UX design courses I’ve taken in the past, I felt fairly confident going into the persona creation process. I packed in a lot of the detail I’d already synthesised through my affinity mapping and felt pleased that I’d created a robust, rich persona that captured my users’ key tasks, behaviours, and attitudes, rather than focusing on demographics (Caddick & Cable 2011: 12). I also wanted to keep accessibility and inclusivity firmly in mind, and was particularly keen to represent and capture needs relating to both physical and mental health (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Persona iteration 1
2.2. Self-criticism: ‘failure’ and self-doubt
My tutors’ initial feedback on my first persona iteration pointed out that it was text-heavy and featured quite a lot of duplicated content, and was therefore not especially easy to either reference or remember.
I was disheartened by the feedback – not because I disagreed with it, but because I felt disappointed that I hadn’t got it ‘more right’ in the first place. A key aspect of my work as a UX Writer involves creating the right content, presented in the right way, at the right time, for the right user. Clarity and an appropriate level of brevity are also paramount to reduce cognitive load and make the user’s experience as simple as possible. I was frustrated that I’d seemingly failed at the first hurdle by creating an overly wordy persona that wouldn’t work as an easy-to-reference design tool.
What surprised me, though, was that my disappointment didn’t last too long. I didn’t spend ages beating myself up for ‘doing it wrong’ or ‘not getting it right the first time’. I had a few moments of frustration, then I gave it another go. It helped me to try and put myself in ‘future-me’s’ shoes and think about what I – as a user of my own design tools – would want from my persona when I’m actually designing my product and want to quickly reference a key behaviour, need, or goal.
2.3. Depth of insight: enhancing my practice – refining my persona
My second iteration (Fig. 2) was an improvement design-wise, with a much cleaner, less cluttered appearance. But the feedback this time was that I’d gone slightly too far in cutting out information. As one of my tutors commented: “This is every creative design process where you are close to the 'right' answer but you have to dance around on the head of a pin for what seems like forever in the Goldilocks 'too hot, too cold' space. While it can be really frustrating not to get creative work done right first time, there's a great deal of value in the time you spend experimenting.”
Fig. 2: Persona iteration 2
This comment struck a chord. It reminded me of a quote from one of my favourite books on creativity from IDEO founder David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley (2014: 41): “The surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.” Indeed, it was Don Norman (2013) himself who said: “We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes.”
Remembering that ‘failures’ are actually just opportunities to learn helped me to regain my focus and persevere. My third iteration (Fig. 3) balances clean design and necessary detail much more effectively. I kept my sentences short and used bullet points to reduce the required reading effort and break information into more manageable chunks.
However, against the recommendations of Caddick & Cable (2011: 12), I did choose to include brief stories to describe my persona’s behaviours and attitudes, as well as their bio and scenario. While Caddick & Cable argue that stories are difficult to write well and won’t be read unless they’re “incredibly engaging” (ibid.), I feel that the stories I’ve crafted are necessary to add realism and humanity to my persona that would otherwise be lacking. What's more, stories can help us to better realise "how goal-oriented most site visitors are" (Redish 2012: 35).
While I do agree that too much detail risks cognitive overload, an appropriate level of detail and backstory helps us to “imagine ourselves as one of our users” (Dählstrom 2020: 194) – which is essential if we want to establish empathy and a deep understanding of their needs and motivations.
Fig. 3: Persona iteration 3
2.3. SMART goal: learn more about the art of storytelling in product design
About a year ago, I started reading Anna Dählstrom’s book Storytelling in Design (2020). At the time, I wasn’t part of a UX product team, and while I enjoyed many of the concepts, it was hard to see how they could be applied to a ‘real-life’ product design project. Now that I am working in UX, I want to re-visit the chapter on ‘Using Character Development in Product Design’ to further understand how personas can be used as a powerful storytelling tool. Digital storytelling is an area I am considering exploring for my Final Major Project, so I plan on reading key chapters of the book and gathering some thoughts on potentially interesting topics before I start work on the project itself.
3. Conclusions
I believe that personas can be an effective method for fostering empathy. However, I’ve also seen teams put in a great deal of effort to create a suite of personas that is then abandoned and forgotten when it comes to the actual design process. As Marsh (2022: 252) attests: "Each time user research is done, your personas should be revisited and re-validated".
I want to explore ways of keeping my persona front of mind throughout the design process – whether that be keeping print-outs close to hand while I iterate and design, or writing out quotes and story snippets on post-it notes and sticking them around my desk. The key will be to keep my character – my main protagonist – alive and well so I can help them successfully complete their journey.
4. References
CADDICK, Richard and Steve CABLE. 2011. Communicating the User Experience : A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation. John Wiley & Sons.
DAHLSTRÖM, Anna. 2020. Storytelling in Design: Defining, Designing, and Selling Multiservice Products. California: O’Reilly Media Inc.
KELLEY, David and Tom KELLEY. 2014. Creative Confidence. London: William Collins.
MARSH, Stephanie. 2022. User Research. 2nd edition. London/New York/New Delhi: Kogan Page Limited.
NORMAN, Don. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.
REDISH, Janice. 2012. Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works. Massachusetts: Elsevier, Inc.
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