Thanks to London IA, I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on Strategic UX that have been starting to take shape into a book recently.

I happened across this twitter exchange this morning. This is a not surprising response to personas, I’ve shared this response at times and have empathy for both points of view.

Here’s the thing… You don’t really want to use personas, do you? They are really a pretty cumbersome way of maintaining your customer’s active presence in the design & product management process.

What you really want is a small, tight team who get who your users are, what they value about your product/service and what is behaviourally significant about them. And you want regular access to them (if you or your boss are representative of your target audience this helps enormously).

Enter reality – the majority of us are not working in this kind of environment. We are working for large organisations who are focussing more on themselves than their users, with people who may not have seen or heard from a customer for years (if ever), whose attention is constantly being focussed on internal KPIs focussed on quantity not quality. Who resist making and decisions in preference to making a sub- optimal decision that can be traced back to them.

Sure, the likelihood of incredible design flourishing in this environment is significantly reduced, but what do we do? Give up?

We can’t all do that, can we? And neither we should.

Many of us have experienced that moment when a team transforms – when they realise what it is like to be their customer and how easy it would be to make that experience better. This most often happens during usability testing. (around the 3rd or 4th participant when the team acknowledges that perhaps we haven’t recruited a bunch of stupid users and maybe we do need to change the design a little).

Well made and well used personas are less able to create this transformation (watching real users will always trump personas) but they can help maintain that transformation and act as a tool to evangelise a customer focus through out the organisation and to create a common language around our users and – possibly my favourite thing – to allow us to reduce usage of the term ‘user’ (so abstract, inhuman and elastic) and replace it with our personas names.

Yes, this does make you feel like a bit of a hippy. I agree. But it helps, a lot, to transform focus from internal processes and priorities to what people actually do, need, want.

You don’t *have* to use personas to do good design. If you make bad personas (made up not researched, focused on demographics not relevant behaviours and attitudes), and if you use then poorly (make them and forget about them, or keep them hidden within the UX team) then you might as well not use them.

But well made personas in day to day use through out the organisation are incredibly useful when you need to gain and maintain focus on the (potential) customer.

Here’s the test:

• do you have personas for your project/product?
• are they made of data from real (potential) customers?
• do they have real names not segment names?
• do you have fewer than five personas?
• can you remember all the names of your personas and describe them?
• do you use them to guide, evaluate and/or explain design decisions?
• can your boss name your personas?
• can the developers on your team name your personas?

If you’re not answering yes to the majority of these, there are probably good reasons why personas aren’t really working out for you.

Don’t fret if you didn’t do so well here – most people don’t (out of a room of dozens of UXers last night only one lonely hand remained in the air at the end of this line of questioning last night).

I reckon personas are the best known but most misunderstood and misused tool in the UX toolkit. Don’t throw your personas out necessarily but see how you can incrementally improve how they’re made and communicated.

And if your fortunate enough to work in a project team who doesn’t need personas, well, lucky you – just don’t be too successful or you may find yourself large enough that you’ll windup needing personas after all! ;)

(For help on making good personas, two excellent resources are Designing for the Digital Age or About Face 3)

Continuing in the community led approach to the experience design, let’s get started taking a look at the information architecture.

A really useful exercise to help understand how people organise, understand and label/name information is to do a card sort. (Ref: A definitive guide to card sorting)

As we’re scattered all over the globe, we’ll have to settle for an online version. I’ve actually set up two versions of the card sort because I particularly want to understand differences between the way that ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ deal with drupal.org information.

If you identify as an ‘insider‘ (which might reflect either your expertise and/or closeness to the drupal community) and you want to participate, please go to this link and participate in the cardsorting exercise.

If you identify as an ‘outsider’ (particularly if you’re new to Drupal, but also if you don’t feel close to the community) and you’d like to paticipate, then your cardsorting exercise can be found here.

It should take you about 15-20 minutes to complete the exercise, so be sure to get yourself a nice cup of tea before you get started!

This is just an information gathering exercise – it’s not going to define the Information Architecture, just help give us the understanding we need to help shape it correctly. Don’t worry too much if there is information missing (we’re just using a sample of the entire site(s)) and don’t worry if you don’t understand what a card means, and feel free to leave copious comments as you go through the exercise – there is a space for you to do so.

As ever, I’ll let you know what interesting things we learn as they come to hand.

(Remember, you can also participate by submitting some wireframes!)

Just a quick note to recommended using Google Docs ‘forms’ as a free tool to manage surveys and recruitment. (Choose New, then Form).

We recently wanted to invite people to participate in user research for the drupal.org redesign project – as a part of this we had a short screener we wanted to run people through so that we can target research appropriately in the coming months (and also get some interesting stats – more on that soon!).

Initially I was planning to use Ethnio, as it is purpose built for this, looks pretty and has a kind of nice DHTML ‘not-popup’. I couldn’t get it working though, so then turned to the ever trusty Survey Monkey, but… eh, so ugly! At the last minute I thought of Google Docs and that’s where we stayed.

Super easy to set up, and a nice clean looking interface out of the box, plus no worries being charged for having too many responses. Easy peasy.

We have since almost 900 responses in a just few days and it seems to have held up nicely.

So, if you are looking for a nice tool to use as a screener or a questionnaire and you’re not too fussed about customising the look and feel, I’d heartily recommend Google Docs.

Disclaimer, disclaimer etc. I’m sure Ethnio works beautifully for lots of people. I tried to get it working for several days without luck and by the time support got back to me, we had hundreds of survey responses to the Google version. I’m also sure you can make Survey Monkey look grand, but I don’t know how and didn’t want to spend the time finding out.

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This weekend I went to BarCamp and it was great. Always good to catch up with fellow campers and hear what’s on their minds.

What was on my mind this weekend was DIY User Research – you can see my slides above. This took me a little out of my comfort zone as I resolved not to say ‘it depends’ but to make some overall recommendations as to how almost anyone can afford the time and budget to do a little research, and the best ways to spend that time or budget.

This has been based on the experiences I’ve had recently doing User Research for start up companies who have very small amounts of time and money, but who desperately need the kind of research that I’ve recommended. The techniques I’ve suggested here have worked very well so far, although I hasten to add that I’ve undertaken the research work myself.

This is not to say that you can’t *really* do it yourself… if you use the right techniques you will get a LOT of value from DIY research… but an experienced researcher is, of course, worth their weight in gold :)