March 16, 2006 Meeting Minutes

Topic: Personas
Facilitator: Sheila Campbell
Guest speaker: Carolyn Barranca, GSA

Announcements

Registration for Web Manager University is opening soon, with a new online registration, up early next week. Watch your email for notification. You’ll need payment to register, so make sure you get your agency pre-approval now so you can register right away. If classes are full, you’ll be wait-listed, and notified via email when space opens. Two-day courses are small at the request of the instructions, since most courses are hands-on. Seminars have more discussion, so classes are larger.

Most courses will be held at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center. See Web Manager University Training Program for more info. A one-day networking workshop is also in the works for sometime this Fall. Sheila will send more details about that soon.

Personas

Our guest speaker was Carolyn Barranca, Web Content Specialist with GSA.gov. Carolyn spoke about her recent experience as program manager for the USA.gov “refresh” project (formerly FirstGov.gov) where she helped develop personas for USA.gov. USA.gov created twelve personas. USA.gov serves such a huge population, so they felt they needed so many “users”.

What are personas?

Personas have become an increasingly popular technique to help design websites based on audience needs and expectations. They’re sometimes called “customer profiles” or “audience profiles.” Personas are hypothetical "stand-ins" for actual users that can help you envision real users, their goals, and expectations. Having these portraits is one way to help you (and your whole team) create web sites that really connect with your audience.

Carolyn provided this quote from George Olsen, Senior Interaction Designer for Yahoo!, who describes personas:

“The persona is a design tool that enforces discipline in the site development process. Because there are many ways to define a user and his or her complex set of motivations, creating a precise persona with a detailed personality, background and behavior helps to focus the design team on meeting the distinct goals and needs of a particular user type.”

The USA.gov staff developed personas that are all fictional website visitors, based on real people, stats, demographics - particular to the needs of USA.gov. They include information about social class, personality, age, gender, family income, where they live, what it’s like to be in their shoes, and what they want from USA.gov. They’re not intended to capture every single user, but the most common “types” of visitors.

Among the 12 USA.gov personas are four Hispanic personas. “Natalia” uses both English and Spanish sites, and the three others primarily use just the Spanish site (GobiernoUSA.gov). They all have varying levels of expertise. There’s a retired teacher who represents seniors. There are also personas who represent a female professional, government worker, child, African American, foreign visitor, etc. They created one for Native Americans, even though they are only 3% of audience. But the developers needed to understand that audience’s needs.

Each persona has a first and last name, a picture, and all sorts of personal details. For example, how many hours a day do they spend online? What are their online fears & frustrations? Profiles show what the person does with their life, and details what kind of content they might want on USA.gov.

It’s difficult to really “validate” personas, because they are fictional. They aren’t the end all, be all, and they aren’t meant to be the only method for knowing your website’s audience.

Sanjay Koyani of HHS (and Usability.gov) explained that personas complement other methods for knowing your audience and developing content, such as focus groups, usability testing, etc.. Personas help avoid “guessing” about what a particular use would want. If your web team can see and connect to a “real” person, it is easier to understand what that “person” needs. It is just another way to represent data about your users and use that information in a practical way.

How do you develop them?

Carolyn spent almost a year learning about personas, studying, going to classes and talking to other web managers. They are always a work-in-progress, since your audience continually changes. Here are some of the ways she and the USA.gov team developed their personas:

Looked at site search data. Checked with Yahoo, Google, etc on how they use personas. Used info from AOL & Microsoft, tried to do as much research as they could, from various resources.
Started with eight personas, but expanded to twelve. Discovered that the Spanish audience was quite varied, and needed to develop ones specific to Spanish-speaking audience, including a bilingual persona.
Used all available demographics to determine “typical” users. Used Web Trends and ASCI survey data. AOL did some research for USA.gov about our users, which was very helpful.
There is a great deal of info online about “general” web users. Nielsen NetRatings is another resource for demographic data. Also looked at telephone stats, and data from callers to 1-800-FED-INFO, which gave more information about “who” was looking for “what” information.

The personas became almost “real” so that, as they were creating these personalities, they almost seemed to be sitting next to the developers as they created them. They are not modeled after one particular person, but characteristics of many individuals, pulled together into a biography.

Finding pictures of these persona people was a hard task. The USA.gov personas were not created as marketing tools to reach out to potential new users. They’re focused on current users and their goals and needs. However, there is not one way to develop them. Depending on how you create them, they can help you develop new content for a potential new user group. In any case, a persona would just be one piece of your marketing plan to reach that new audience.

How much effort is involved in creating them?

USA.gov developed its personas as part of a larger project to redesign its website. Six or seven people ended up working at various times on developing personas, with four to five months of work to develop the final ones.

Carolyn briefly described the USA.gov redesign project in response to caller questions. USA.gov put out separate statements of work for both English & Spanish sites, since they wanted a vendor who was fluent in Spanish to work on the Spanish site and a separate, focused process to redesign both sites. They are calling it a refresh versus redesign because they’re not planning to change navigation and taxonomy.

The current “refresh” project includes baseline usability testing, that has led to creating three different versions of the homepage plus different versions of seven other pages. They’ve now usability tested the two favorite designs and will pick the final one after more testing. The focus in on using a user-centric design approach, and any changes need to test well before they’ll be implemented.

How can you use personas?

Personas need to represent the broad range of users and user needs for your website. At the same time, they need to pinpoint the specific needs of particular types of users.

Callers asked how to “validate” the personas. Carolyn explained that for USA.gov, contractors did the validation, ensuring that the personas reflected their site demographics, statistics, and other research as much as possible. They tried to represent people throughout the country. For their federal employee persona, they looked at federal job descriptions to find out what a typical job was like, visited the community to see what the city was like and to find out what a “typical” person in that city might like, and how they might live.

USA.gov staff will be using the personas, and they’ll do posters so people can “see” for whom they are writing, as they develop content. They serve as a good reminder for content developers, so they remember they are writing specifically for a particular “person.”

Personas were actually used during USA.gov redesign process. After baseline usability testing, the team selected two designs, and used personas to figure out which design worked best for the personas.

Other agencies that have used personas

HUD has developed basic personas, based on “killer content”, to help a “typical user” find and use that killer content. HUD’s personas aren’t as detailed as the ones developed by USA.gov. But they have found their more simplified versions to work well.

Janet from the New Jersey Dept. of Health mentioned that they’ve had great success using personas. They is now talking about “ Lynn in Nebraska” when discussing changes to site.

USA.gov also tracks language/clicks on home page – changing/improving wording of one link resulted in a HUGE increase in usage of a particular link.

Additional resources about personas

Both Webcontent.gov and Usability.gov have resources about personas. See:

Know Your Audience and Do Market Research (includes a short section on personas)
Usability.gov resources on personas (includes examples from HUD, HHS, and USDA)

Sheila Campbell of Webcontent.gov and Sanjay Koyani of Usability.gov will coordinate after the call to see how we can consolidate the information and provide additional resources.

Carolyn mentioned that the USA.gov team plans to post information on Webcontent.gov about their site “refresh,” including project plans, usability test plans and scenarios, draft design wireframes, lessons learned, etc.

Please share any resources about personas, or how you used them in your site redesign. Send Sheila Campbell any personas you’d like to share, for posting on webcontent.gov: Sheila.campbell@gsa.gov

Final Reminders

Next call is on April 20, 2006 at 11 am EST. However, the next several monthly alls conflict with a few Web Manager University seminars, so the date and/or time might be adjusted for the next couple of months. We’ll keep you posted!

Page Updated or Reviewed: January 12, 2007