角色：设置剧情来建造适用的信息站点（2）
ryana 发表于16:23 2004-04-12UI之旅乃作者的随手笔记，请移步到用户体验研究blog--油茶研究会
The Cast for Northbay.com
Our persona investigation for the newspaper's developing site, Northbay.com, began by sorting through stacks of paper. We spent a month culling through industry reports about online newspaper usage and the paper's own research, measuring online usage patterns for entertainment information. The market data reaped some useful demographic findings about our target user group and helped define
the interview sample for persona building.
At last, we were good to go—our market research review was completed and our persona interviews were lined up and scheduled. All in all, the persona interviewing process took about 3 weeks to complete. Interviews ran 1-2 hours each, and most were rich with details. Based on the subject interviews' goals, we created four personas for the project: Greg, Robert, Sarah, and Annette.
THE PRIMARY PERSONA IS TOP DOG
The project's primary persona was Greg. His goals—being a great father and interesting date—drove the site's design. For someone active like Greg, the site's design needed to be accessible and quick to use. He isn't willing to dig more than a link or two into the site; either what he wants is on the first load of the home page or he goes somewhere else. Since he is a local guy, the site needed a large stockpile of constantly changing, local events information for both kids' activities and adult splurges. Greg isn't just a weekend tourist.
With the interface we designed for meeting Greg's goals, we also satisfied the needs of the secondary personas, Robert and Sarah. Robert is a retired business executive, who had newly arrived in the North Bay and lives in a home he bought 3 years ago in a small subdivision north of town. Like Greg, he is active and adventuresome. He likes to hike and take long drives on country roads with his wife to see what new place he'll discover and what new acquaintances he'll make. He often entertains family and friends coming to the wine country on weekends.
Unlike Greg, Robert has plenty of time on his hands; his kids are grown. Robert is out to make up for all of the leisure time he lost when he worked 60-plus hours a week. As far as Northbay.com's design was concerned, Robert has the time, energy, and computer skills to "digitally putter" and browse. As long as Northbay is easy to use and current, Robert will be satisfied.
Sarah is another secondary persona we defined for the project. A salesperson for Demptos Glass Company, Inc., a wine bottle manufacturer in Napa, Sarah rents a condo in Yountville. She regularly travels the North Bay region, "wining and dining" clients, as well as prospective customers. She prides herself on being "in the know"—an insider in the wine country scene, which includes her expansive knowledge about wineries, the arts, restaurants, and the wine industry.
In a nutshell, Sarah is a bon vivant who sees herself as a trusted opinion leader within her circle of friends. As long as detailed and current restaurant and movie reviews are posted on Northbay, then, sure enough, she will find them. Northbay is just one of the virtual stops she will make before logging off and heading out in her BMW on weekly sales rounds.
NEGATIVE PERSONAS DEFINE NON-USERS
Annette was the project's negative persona—someone for whom we were not trying to design the site. Annette is an office manager and a creature of habit. Ensconced in her routine life in her rental, she takes her three kids once a week to the same Olive Garden restaurant off Highway 101.
When all is said and done, Annette admits she could be living anywhere "out here," she really does not care to take advantage of the North Bay region. She seeks stability and order in her busy life as a single mother. Northbay, a hands-on interactive entertainment guide, is a site that Annette is not likely to use with any frequency.
A DESIGN FOR PERSONAS
In order to meet the personas' collective goals, the design of Northbay.com includes an interactive calendar with a comprehensive listing of upcoming events that are accessible by clicking on a given date. An interior page for each entry has a link for a map with driving directions and a table with the event's sponsor, cost, contact information, and originating source. In order to make the site more of a community resource, the feature also allows users to submit events.
Another "persona-pleaser" is the "Search n' Go" feature on the home page. The quick search feature allows users to conduct a filtered, targeted search by putting in a keyword and then narrowing down a search with a click to a radio button that specifies a movie, restaurant, recreation, or classifieds search. The filtered restaurant search is likely to satisfy Sarah, who's a savvy user with narrow content needs. But in order to satisfy Greg, too, we added a detailed "kid-friendly" rating for each restaurant listing in the database. That way, Greg could quickly glance at page of listings and decide whether the restaurant was a good place to go with his kids or on a romantic date with a girlfriend.
The "North Bay Top 10" on the home page is added for users who like to browse instead of target search. The feature was designed to satisfy Robert, who is curious and open to suggestion. But the list satisfies Sarah, too, who needs to be knowledgeable about the talk of the town. Finally, the Top 10 is likely to keep Greg happy when he wants a one-stop answer to his burning question, "What's going on this weekend?"
The Persona Chart for Greg
Age: 37
Occupation: Senior Loan Manager, Construction and Mortgage Lending Group atExchange Bank in SantaRosa.
Home life: Divorced,
single dad,
two children (Erin, 12, and Kyle, 8), joint custody ofkids.
Education: BS in Accounting
LIFESTYLE
Activities: Goes out to dinner once a week with kids, three times a month for a nice dinner and a bottle of wine with a girlfriend. Fishes at local lakes, canoes, hikes, tries to take his kids on a different outing each weekend "to keep our time together special." Plans to take kids to an ox roast in Sonoma this weekend.
Ultimate goal: To discover new things to do with his kids. To get his kids out andaway from the TV.
To be a good, caring parent in an increasingly crazy andbusy world.
WEB USE AND INFORMATION NEEDS
Web usage: Checks e-mail fivetimes a day, laptop,
T1 line at work, plays fantasy sports on AOL account, reads restaurant and wine reviews a couple times a month.
Web competency: Intermediate. Thinks the Web is easy to use.
Frustrations with the Web: Spam and lack of credibilityof information posted on sites.
What kind of information is hard to find: Local sports information, up-to-date information about community events that are happening this weekend, and nontourist practicalities, such as whether broccoli isavailable at the farmer'smarket.
Frequent sources of information: Anything that'shandy, including clipped ads from the paper, magazine listings, local Websites, and other listings of upcoming events.
Quote: "I'm an explorer. I'mthe kind of guy who wants to know every road in the county and where it might take me."
Talking with Persona Maven Kim Goodwin
Q: You are a passionate advocate for using personas. How did that come about? How did you become a persona expert?
A: I guess you could say I became a persona expert by developing the method for creating personas and using them to solve design problems. Alan Cooper [founder of the interaction design firm bearing his name] originally came up with the idea of using a fictitious user with a set of goals to help guide and focus the design of a product. Over the years, I and the other designers at Cooper have turned that original idea into a rigorous form of user model, based on behavior patterns that emerge from ethnographic research. A set of personas represents the key behaviors, attitudes, skill levels, goals, and workflows of real people we interview and observe, which we then use along with scenarios to guide the product's functionality and design. The method has matured to the point that anyone trained in it should be able to get the same personas from the same data.
Q: I'm hoping you can give us a brief example of how personas might actually work. Let's say you're a corporate librarian, designing a market research intranet to give fellow workers access to industry analyst reports, online commercial providers (like LexisNexis), and valuable research Web sites. You decide to use personas. Who should conduct the persona interviews? Who should
be interviewed?
A: There are a lot of factors that go into planning your interviews. Basically, though, you'll want to interview types of people whose needs you expect will be different. For example, would you expect the needs of an individual contributor to be different from those of a manager? Will new employees' behavior differ much from that of veteran employees, or will employees in the marketing department differ from employees in HR? In a sense, you're forming a hypothesis about who your personas might be. Ideally, interview a broad set of people, because you might find differences you didn't expect.
Ideally, the same people who will be doing the design—because they'll ask better questions—conduct the interviews. They'll need this kind of contextual information later on. The interviewers should be people trained in ethnographic techniques, who also don't have a particular organizational or product development agenda to push.
Q: What's your estimate of how long it might take to do the interviews, compile the findings, and develop the personas?
A: We find that for most simple consumer products, that takes somewhere on the order of 2 weeks, maybe a little more. For a complex enterprise application with multiple interfaces, it may be 4 or 5 weeks, or possibly a little more. However, we don't actually start with user interviews first. Before we talk to any users, we speak with the business stakeholders—the people who are funding the initiative, or who have to build, sell, or support the product. It's important to understand the organizational goals, so you can put the user goals in context. If you can't accomplish organizational goals like reducing training time and support costs, increasing efficiency, and so on, you don't have a
viable product.
Q: Does the primary persona usually turn out to be the one that has the fewest skills or is the lowest common denominator in all of the people that are interviewed?
A: Not necessarily. That's fairly common for the simplest consumer products, when you want someone to be able to walk up and immediately use the tool. With productivity tools, whether they're for consumers or businesses, the primary persona is more often what we call a "perpetual intermediate," which means someone who has a grasp on the critical tasks and domain knowledge but is not—and never will be—an expert. In some cases, the choice of primary persona is not so much about skill level, but about how representative that person's goals and tasks are.
Q: You've used personas a lot in your work at Cooper. Who is one of your favorite personas that has been developed for a project, and why?
A: My favorite persona ever was Gerta Weissman, whom we developed for a long-term healthcare management system that would simplify the management of clinical and billing data. Gerta was what we call a "served persona"—someone who will never sit down and use the product but whose needs are critical in the product's design. Gerta was an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who lived in a long-term care facility. It would have been really easy to put a barcode bracelet on Gerta's wrist to simplify tracking her prescriptions and treatments, but Gerta's goals about being treated with dignity wouldn't allow for that. Although we spent most of our time with our clinical and business user personas, Gerta kept the whole team focused on the people we were ultimately serving.
Kim Goodwin is VP and general manager at Cooper [www.cooper.com], a leading interaction design consultancy. Kim's design expertise and teaching skill have made her popular as a speaker at conferences, universities, and corporate events. At Cooper, Kim ensures excellent delivery of Cooper's design consulting and training services. Kim has played a major role in developing Cooper's Goal-Directed methods and has led the effort to turn those methods into an interaction design curriculum. Kim has led a wide range of design projects, from e-commerce applications to information appliances, IP telephony systems, and healthcare applications.
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REFERENCES: [1] Cooper, Alan. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis: Sams, 1999. 261 pp. [2] For a complete account of the BBCi redesign project, see "The Glass Wall: The Homepage Redesign 2002" [www.blackbeltjones.com/theglasswall.pdf]. 86 pp. [3] Souza, Randy, "Get ROI from Design." Forrester Research, Inc. (June 2001) [www.uk.cgey.com/services/crm/docs/roi__design.pdf]. 21 pp. |
Alison J. Head, Ph.D. [alison@sonic.net] is the author of two books about usability: Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (CyberAge Books, 1999) and On-the-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Research Intranets? (Special Libraries Association, 2002). Her firm provides usability research and testing for Fortune 500 and other clients [www.ajhead.com].
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