For Whom Are You Creating Your Site?
March 2010
Most people start building a website completely at the wrong end of the process. Surprised? Think about it: how often have you heard somebody say Our website should be blue to match our logo
, or We need to get more people to subscribe to our newsletters
as the very first idea towards a new site?
It's important - no, crucial - to keep one thing in mind all the way throughout building a website, right from the very first inkling of an idea, until you retire the website in favour of a new one: your users. You'd be amazed to know how often we hear Of course, the users
, as if they were an afterthought. Without your users, your website might as well not exist. Taken to its extreme: if nobody visits your site, you may as well not bother spending all the money building it.
Who are your users?
If we can agree that a website without visitors is a waste of time or money, then we probably also agree that we're building the website for our users. Not the company CEO. Not the marketing department. Not the press office or the employees of the company. The users who are actually going to be using and interacting with your site.
One effective technique for identifying your users is to create specific 'personae' for them. Basically, you are creating realistic people with personalities, and imagining how they would interact with a website.
Creating a user persona
To create a good persona, start with a few basic personalia; how old are they, which gender are they, where do they live, what do they do for a living, and what is their name? Let's try that. We now have Tom, who is a 32-year-old man who works as a car mechanic in Bristol, and Lisa, who is 45 and is a GP in a small clinic in west Yorkshire. Next, try to find some photos on the Internet (iStockphoto.com is a good place to get them) which match the people you have created out of thin air.
Create between five and seven people who give a good cross-section of your typical site users. Remember that all of your users should be represented, so maybe you should consider adding Mary, who is a 19-year old student in Brighton who is blind, and James Junior, who is 60 years old, recently retired as a welder for a Plymouth shipyard, who is slightly dyslexic and suffers from red/green colour blindness.
Take all these people, stick their photo at the top of a sheet of paper, along with a bulleted list of their main personal traits. Add some minor personality traits, too: Tom might be reluctant to use his credit card online, for example, whilst Lisa has a strong preference for using the menu system of sites instead of its search functionality. Hang these sheets in a row along the wall where you keep all your meetings. If you're sitting in a way that some people would have their backs to the pictures, print out two sets, and hang one set on the opposite wall, too. The idea is that for every decision that is made in a project, Lisa, Tom and all the others are staring you straight in the eyes. You're making this website for me
, they're saying, Make sure I'll be able to use it well
.
Using your personae
Now that you have your set of personae, you have to think about how to actually use them. The personae with disabilities obviously impose project-wide constraints: all pages have to be readable by people with colourblindness, and have to be usable to people with screen readers, but there are more subtle cues as well.
To use these personae well, we use a separate technique, known as 'user stories'. These are short statements written in a specific format, describing an action that a user might wish to perform on a website. For example: as a site visitor, I want to be able to subscribe to a newsletter, so I can keep up to date with the news from this organisation. This user story contains a fair bit of information: it tells us who wants to do the action, what they want to do, and why.
When the time comes to implement this particular piece of functionality, walk through it with each of your personae in mind. So: as Lisa the 45-year-old-GP from West Yorkshire, I want to be able to sign up to a newsletter. Can you see any particular needs or considerations you have to make with this particular persona? How about Tom or Mary?
When it comes to writing your content, your personae might also prove useful. The car mechanic and the GP might prefer different types of language, whilst your dyslexic would probably prefer avoidance of excessively labyrinthine and sesquipedalianist language. It's up to your copywriters to try to find the best possible balance between tone, formality, and accessibility.
By constantly looking at your own website through the eyes of imaginary people who might be your future site users, you are much more likely to deliver a site which is suitable to their needs - and hence a site which is more usable and user-friendly overall.
