Clicks & Notes

Avenue A / Razorfish - Creating Quality Personas: Understanding the Levers that Drive User Behavior (PDF, 778 kb)

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. In addition, defining and designing for a set of specific personas helps to avoid the common practice of trying to design for all users.

• three basic steps in the persona development process:
  • identify target research segments – review a company’s existing customer segments and supporting market research
  • conduct qualitative research with real people – techniques can include ethnographic observation and interviews, diaries, etc.
  • analyze the data and develop the personas – look for attitudinal patterns, contexts, behaviors
• scope considerations for persona development:
  • size and diversity of the customer base
  • geographic reach
  • depth of behavioral frameworks – deeper insights require multiple data collection methods and more intensive analysis
  • desire to quantify qualitative results – personas can be “tested” through quanitative methods such as surveying

(Via GUUUI.)

See also this previous post: Creating Personas

Clikz.com - Prioritize Usability Testing and Web Analytics

• usability testing and web analytics have a common goal – measuring a site’s ability to drive user conversions – but they approach this differently:
  

  Web analytics measure visitor intent and persuasive momentum, as well as the site’s ability to move visitors through a conversion scenario.

  Usability examines the site’s interface and process barriers that keep visitors from accomplishing a conversion task.

• using analytics allows you to track actual actions taken on the site, in real time, with a very large sample group
• usability testing, with individual respondents, provides insight into what happens in particular instances; however, artificial nature of the testing environment doesn’t necessarily provide an accurate reflection of user engagement
• on combining the two approaches:
  

  Generally speaking, use Web analytics to determine where to make site changes and usability tests to determine what to test.

(Via Column Two.)

Update 03 March 2005: One thing that occured to me (and is not – in my mind – explicity stated in the above-noted article) about making use of both web analytics and usability testing when optimizing your site:

• analytics will tell you where the roadblocks occur on your site; usability testing will tell you why

Hurol Inan - Web Analytics – The Voice of Users in Information Architecture Projects, and Hurol Inan - Information Architecture through Web Analytics

• both articles discuss incorporating web analytics into the information architecture process
• areas examined by a web analyst include:
  

  • Website usage by content category
  • Popular and not-so-popular elements of each content category
  • Affinity between content categories
  • Major tasks and possible frustration points
  • On-site search usage, including where users revert to searching

Hurol Inan - Information Architecture – The Key to HTML Email Optimization

• designing an HTML email is also a form of information architecture
• regarding email click-to-open rates:
  

  A great majority of users only click on a single link – with the average number of clicks by a clicking user ranging anywhere from 1.2 to 1.8

• applying IA principles to email can improve this rate dramatically – in one case:
  

  We saw a 50% improvement on the click-to-open rate and a four-fold increase on clicks on feature content.

(Preceding three links via iaSlash.)

See also this previous post: Web Analytics and Continual Site Optimization