podcast: the ux power tools behind compelling software part...

[Year]

Podcast: The UX Power Tools Behind Compelling Software Part 1 Task-based Personas

Prepared for: Macadamian Technologies

No. of pages: 7

Audio recording Identification: UnSalted_ep2 00:10:31

Transcript prepared by : Capital Transcription Services

Host: Graham Machacek, Manager of Marketing Communications, Macadamian Technologies

Guests: Anneliis Tosine, User Experience Researcher, Macadamian Technologies

Sara Fortier, User Experience Designer, Macadamian Technologies

5/14/2013

Podcast: The UX Power Tools Behind Compelling Software Part 1

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++Audio++ 00:00:01 [Intro music]

Welcome to Macadamian’s audio Podcast- unsalted. Strategic insights on software development and

user experience design. We are bringing you snack-sized discussions your brain can munch on. Join the

conversation at macadamian.com.

Graham Machacek: Hi listeners! I am your host Graham Machacek, Manager of Marketing

Communications at Macadamian. Welcome to our mini-series focussing on the

power tools behind compelling software. These are the things we provide our

clients as we move through the user experience research and design process

when we create software products. In this installment, we decided to focus on

task-based personas. I am joined today by two of my colleagues at Macadamian.

First, user experience researcher extraordinaire, Anneliis Tosine. How are you

today?

Anneliis Tosine: I am doing very well Graham; good to be here.

Graham Machacek: And also, Sara Fortier, user experience designer. Sara, how are you?

Sara Fortier: I am good thank-you.

Graham Machacek: You are based in California and we are recording this in the winter, so I will try

not to be jealous.

[Chuckling]


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Graham Machacek: Sara is joining us via Skype. Let us just get right into this topic. Anneliis, first, it

would be great if you could tell listeners why it is important that business

requirements and user requirements be aligned before we start any project. So,

why do we not just start there and then we will go—

Sara Fortier: Sure, I think that is a great spot to start. At Macadamian, we often recommend

to our clients that we start any project with identifying these two types of

requirements. We are talking about business and user requirements and we do

this to help manage risk of these projects. We first start off with our clients in

collaboration with them and start identifying and pulling together their business

requirements. These are business and customer goals, stakeholder value chain

and success metrics. Then, we use a variety of research methods to hone in and

identify their user requirements. These are the real needs of their end-users and

it is based on their use and behaviour. We identify what the user needs in order

to complete a specific goal and this is the foundation of user-centred design.

What we are outlining and identifying in user requirements are user groups,

task identification, context of use and usability goals. We identify all of these

business and user requirements so that we can form the design and this is how

it helps to mitigate the risk. For example, when businesses have an

understanding of their customers’ goals, they are able to bridge that gap

between their own business requirements and their user requirements to

determine what the customer values and essentially what they are willing to pay

for.


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Graham Machacek: Anneliis, what are personas and usage scenarios? Maybe you can tell us where

they fall into the process of designing a software product.

Anneliis Tosine: Sure. From these user requirements and from that phase in collaboration with

our client, the real great and more valuable deliverable that comes out of that

are these task-based personas which is our focus for today. These personas

function as stand-ins for real users to guide decisions about design and

functionality. This document can capture a number of personas which are

typical users of the product. It outlines their goals, provides insights into how

they would want to use the product to achieve those goals. This information has

to be tallied in some kind of fashion so that designers and developers can

consume throughout the course of the development process. A persona can do

this very well; it can help give direction to the team and really personalized the

end users. We distill all of this information into personas and this is what we

provide back to the product team.

Graham Machacek: Okay, how do you know if you have captured everything correctly and recorded

the real essence of your user groups?

Anneliis Tosine: That is a great question and we get that a lot. We can use a number of different

activities to do this—to validate the personas such as ethergraphic research.

This approach, an Ethernet graphic approach, helps us better understand the

people and the organizations we design for not only to get them products that

address their needs, but also it starts to reveal their shared attitudes or goals,


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their practices that influence decisions and adoption of the product and on-

going use of a particular product.

Graham Machacek: Okay. Sara, I am Just going to check in with you know. I just want to know what

risks in your view are associated with products that do not incorporate task-

based personas. Let us get into the meat of it here!

Sara Fortier: Sure. I mean, this is something that we run into a lot with clients given that

selling research services can be a bit more challenging, but task-based personas

really help provide context for the business and user requirements. When you

get into an actual situation where you are developing software—you are

designing for the user and sort of asking yourself what the user would want in a

situation. Personas really help to focus the design task and development task to

look and see what their motivations are and what that actual person would be

doing—what would John Smith do in this situation? Later in the product

development process, the personas also aid in communication and help to

prioritize the trade-offs and other considerations you come across when you are

making product design decisions. The bottom line is that they are useful

throughout the entire user experience design process.

Graham Machacek: We should probably share some case studies of what has gone wrong when

task-based personas are not use. Do you have any more specific kinds of

examples?

Sara Fortier: I mean, as I have mentioned, we run into this with our clients sometimes where

we do not always have the opportunity to do Ethernet graphic research to come


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up with our task-based personas and it really effects the success of the product

because you have to make certain assumptions as you are designing for a user

that you actually do not know enough about.

Graham Machacek: I am guessing sometimes some clients might think it is not necessary because

they have been working with the user group for so long—is that the idea or

maybe they have done other research?

Sara Fortier: Yes, exactly. Clients will basically give you their assumptions that they think their

customers or users want and we have to help guide them and fill them in on

who their users actually are. Sometimes they will not line up with their

expectations.

Graham Machecek: Yes, but sometimes probably that is a good thing; you probably get some

insights out of that that lead to new discoveries and a better product.

Sara Fortier: Yes, absolutely.

Graham Machacek: Anneliis, can you share some examples of how task-based personas have helped

focus some decisions—some real decision and hard decisions that people have

to make?

Anneliis Tosine: Of course. Like Sara has mentioned, these personas help make decisions with

those end-users in mind. We are really bridging that gap of knowledge that

maybe missing and we are bridging the gap between development and U X in

order to show us why something, let us say it is a feature or content, is

important in the product. By using a persona to answer questions like what


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information is necessary at what point in a work flow or does the user have

frequent interruptions during their experience or why are they using the

product, so by answering some of these questions teams can actually be in the

user’s shoes and better understand what a real user needs and wants. In

essence, personas are observations and descriptions of why a person does what

he/she may do. What they start to help to do is take focus away from

requirements and deliverables for a designer so they can really focus on the

user’s goals. Essentially, if you do not know who you are designing for, you

cannot actually design anything.

Graham Machacek: Yes, good point. Sara, what is the one thing CEOs of software companies need

to know about personas—let us start with that audience.

Sara Fortier: As I was kind of mentioning before, the idea that CEOs and companies—they all

have expectations about who their users are and who their customers are and it

is really important for them to understand that we are not actually looking for

opinions or who they think their users are. We are really concentrating on

motivations and looking for the needs and what is driving the user—why are

they trying to accomplish a certain task and how do they need to get there. In

the end, the project team really needs to know that in order to figure out what

the new features are going to be and if you want to expand into new markets or

come up with new offerings, you can only really do that through the user

research and through coming up with these personas.


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Graham Machacek: Yes, okay. Same question, but let us talk about product managers. What are the

things that product managers need to know about personas?

Sara Fortier: Well, I think it is similar, but just more tactical maybe. Personas sort of allow

you to understand, identify and communicate to the whole team what the

needs are and it does it in a really efficient and effective way. The product

manager should be using these with their developers, designers and pushing it

also to their clients just so everyone can align themselves on what those

motivations and needs are and having that tangible artifact helps them do that.

Graham Machecek: And on other audience we should definitely mention is software engineers—

what about for software engineers? What considerations should they be

thinking about in terms of personas?

Sara Fortier: For engineers in particular, we have found that it can be really useful to give

them that ‘why’ because when they get into the nitty-gritty when they are

working on a particular user story they do not always know why they are

actually doing it. Sometimes a lot of compromises are made because it is

quicker to develop and easier for them, but when they actually understand from

a user’s perspective why it is important to develop it in a certain way, the

engineers are a lot more motivated to do it that way too.

Graham Mackecek: Alright. Thanks everyone for tuning into our mini-series on the power tools

behind compelling software and it has been really interesting listening to all of

the information on task-based personas and we hope you will tune into our

other additions that are coming shortly. Thanks so much and have a great week!


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[Closing music]

You have been listening to Macadamian’s audio Podcast—unsalted. Get more tasty insights on our blog.

Visit macadamian.com.

+++End of audio+++ 00:10:31

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