Russell Webb Design

Tag: user needs

  • Using proto-personas to Know your user – Pt I

    Using proto-personas to Know your user – Pt I

    Execute a Content Audit using proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. Consolidate personas, communicate findings, to achieve a deeper understanding of all users.
    Empower UX to move forward with experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.

    Contents

    Please note; for client confidentiality sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixelated. All work is copyright ©RussellWebbDesign 2024

    Hard Skills:

    Design Process

    Service Blueprint

    Proto-Personas

    Soft Skills:

    Service Design

    Journey Mapping

    Customer Experience Design

    Full List →

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.

    Limited Data, Maximum Impact

    Delivering with resource constraints and tight timeline, this Content Audit / Inventory Battle Plan leverages the power of proto-personas as the primary intel.

    Gather the troops

    Assemble all content audit data

    Regulated design environments are often constrained – it is important to offer agility and be resourceful. This level of Service Design would benefit from ;

    • Customer surveys
    • Stakeholder interviews
    • Analytics (rationalised down into meaningful chunks)

    …and additional data. For this UX project the starting point was an extended collection of unverified proto-personas. These were then rationalised in to bucketed or grouped personas.

    Navigating the complexity of proto-personas

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.
    Proto-personas: Adaptability in the face of organisational inertia and provide clarity to maintain stakeholder engagement.

    Adapt UX to audience and personas

    Larger organisations, often new agile methodologies, may still be in the early stages of embracing lean UX, so adapt your approach to your audience is a key skill.

    When personas are agreed and validated as the only ‘source of truth’ – there also must be alignment that these refine and adapt personas over time, ensuring that they remain relevant.

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.
    Overly detailed personas can dilute effectiveness, especially for large organisations. This task focused on consolidating personas for greater clarity.

    Focussed personas work well. Larger organisations multiply these audience types and their impact is reduced. This task looked at grouping and sorting by commonalities

    Conduct extensive desk research to develop a deep understanding

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.
    Embark on a deep dive of user research to become the brand’s go-to expert on your target audience.

    Absorb insights

    Take the time to listen and absorb – Become the brand’s knowledge hub.

    Absorbing insights and data is vital. Time spent at this stage of your research is key for informing a future IA.

    Dig deeper to understand your users problems, needs and goals

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.
    Experience maps are your tools to excavate the nuances of user behaviour, emotions, and motivations. Use this to win over their hearts and minds.

    Empathy-driven UX; Personas and experience maps

    By delving into the emotional landscape of proto-personas, designers can gain a deeper user understanding. This insight fuelled the development of a clear and empathetic experience map.

    Understand your audience types ; Their needs, aspirations, and behaviours. Commonalities and patterns will surface.

    Common Thread and Outcomes

    Despite resource limitations, this Content Audit project successfully utilised proto-personas to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. By consolidating and refining persona data into meaningful ‘chunks’, and effectively communicating findings to stakeholders, all lead to a deeper comprehension of users for all involved. This empowered us to move forward with the next stage – using experience maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.
    By selecting the most crucial key phrases from the workshop discussions, I was able to distil the essence of each audience type and crafted them into a call-to-arms that galvanised the mapping stage

    Expertise within the team distilled the most essential insights (i.e. OUTCOMES), transforming them into powerful ‘calls to arms’ that served as the foundation for the mapping stage.

    Next steps

    By consolidating vast amounts of data into prototype persona groups, this Service Design approach conveys insights for stakeholders to digest, leading to deeper user understanding for all involved. This then informs the next stage, ‘Using Experience Maps to uncover user behaviour and emotions.’

    Please note; for client confidentiality sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixelated. All work is copyright ©RussellWebbDesign 2024

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    CASE STUDIES

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  • Using Experience Maps to uncover user behaviour Pt II

    Using Experience Maps to uncover user behaviour Pt II

    TLDR: Reveal a tapestry of needs and motivations that shape financial decisions. Using Experience Mapping to uncover insights into the customer lifecycle and expose common threads.

    Contents

    Hard Skills:

    Journey Mapping

    Research

    Visual Design

    Soft Skills:

    Empathy

    Collaboration

    Critical Thinking

    Full List →

    Please note; for client confidentiality sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixelated. All work is copyright ©RussellWebbDesign 2023

    This article builds upon the previous post ‘Get to know your users better‘. For a more comprehensive understanding of the UX and Service Design process that led to this point, I encourage readers to refer back.

    Visualise the Journey

    From Common Themes to Experience Mapping

    You should now really begin to unravel the who, what and why that define your target audience. Now there is an opportunity to unearth the common themes that weave through their experiences, transforming them into actionable insights through experience mapping.

    Generic heat map, or Experience Maps showing user needs, problems and goals. Transform these themes into actionable insights that will guide the design process to resonate with the needs of your users.
    Generic heat map, or Experience Maps showing user needs, problems and goals. Transform these themes into actionable insights that will guide the design process to resonate with the needs of your users.

    Applying mapping techniques to personas types

    Shifting the traditional application of an experience map and focussing on the customer lifecycle particular to this financial services customer, more insight and understanding was surfaced by categorising the needs, problems, and goals distinct to an informed personas-type actioning a focussed single, representative task. These were segmented into emotions and motivations.

    In the details with Investor Type #1

    Plot what emotions a particular segmented persona was experiencing across a single representative task
    Plot what emotions a particular segmented persona was experiencing across a single representative task

    Investor type #1 persona – “I want to quickly get to the details of a fund” categorised how they were orientated through the digital experience and uncovered how to attract, engage, orient, and retain this specific persona. 

    The mindset of Investor Type #2

    By analysing how well the current design met these needs, we uncovered opportunities to attract, engage, and retain this valuable persona.
    Analysing the current design and uncover opportunities to attract, engage, and retain this valuable persona.

    Investor type #2 persona – Easily justify that a fund is performing also followed the control. Beginning with Orientation, linked to defined buckets and evaluating needs around investment philosophy, financial storytelling and model portfolios, for example. Identify what Attract mechanism drew them in and if ease-of-access to data influenced their decision-making process.

    Empowering Investor Type #3 with Confidence

    The 'Retain' narrative: Develop a more comprehensive understanding of investor needs and motivations, paving the way for a more tailored and effective digital experience.
    The ‘Retain’ narrative: Develop a more comprehensive understanding of investor needs and motivations, paving the way for a more tailored and effective digital experience.

    Investor type #3 persona – Guide me and make me feel in control when investing builds on the Retain narrative, examining how the digital experience addresses their need for support and guidance. From an Invest and Help perspective, how Risk is demonstrated and how to cultivate Trust empowering them to navigate the investment landscape with confidence.

    Type #4; The insider scoop

    Identifying opportunities to enhance the "Help" and "Invest" narratives, providing clear guidance, personalised recommendations, and transparent risk information.
    Identifying opportunities to enhance the “Help” and “Invest” narratives, providing clear guidance, personalised recommendations, and transparent risk information.

    Investor type #4 persona had the need to “Provide easily accessible information to reassure my position” as a corporate user. Touch points pushed to ’encouraged a long term time investment,’ and ‘establishing the real truth was behind the marketing efforts’. The needs and wants of this user all stemmed from cutting through the noise and showing insider industry knowledge for trends and success.

    The combined heat map

    Combined heat map: Highlighting the priority needs and common themes included storytelling, transparency and easy-to-understand content
    Combined heat map: Highlighting the priority needs and common themes included storytelling, transparency and easy-to-understand content

    Unifying insights to prioritise needs

    The combined heat map elevated the investor experience and fostered stronger relationships with clients and customers, empowering them to achieve their financial goals.

    Priority touch points

    This highlighted insight from the proto-persona grouped to Thinking and Doing actions during the activity; How our audience behaved within each section of the customer lifecycle.

    User needs by lifecycle

    By further analysing the results reveal traffic light priorities. Here I have only shown one persona group.

    By aligning content with user needs and ensuring stakeholder buy-in, this organisation can create a more impactful content strategy that drives business growth and enhances user experience.

    Next steps

    Dynamic Mapping

    Map identified priority touch-points

    Partner the priority touch-points identified in this article (and the previous ‘Get to know your users better‘) to the actual site content.

    30K Pages

    Resource & Allocation.

    With over 30K site pages, HR Resource and Budgeting need to use the above data in their Business Case to justify allocation.

    Alignment

    Stakeholder management

    Harnessing the collective energy of stakeholders to transform content into a powerful tool that drives results.

    By aligning content with user needs and ensuring stakeholder buy-in, this organisation can create a more impactful content strategy that drives business growth and enhances user experience.

    Please note; for client confidentiality sensitive parts of all imagery has been pixelated. All work is copyright © RussellWebbDesign 2023