Process: User Modeling

Personas are essential tools in adopting a user-centered approach to product design. Personas help a product team maintain a constant focus on their target users, ensuring that the designed product conforms to their needs and requirements. Personas are useful throughout the complete design lifecycle—from developing business requirements, product concepts, functional specifications, and Web content to interaction and visual design for the product user interface.

Alan Cooper pioneered the adoption of the Goal-Directed Design methodology, including the use of personas, as a practical approach to interaction design for high-technology products. Creating personas is a quick, efficient way of gauging the needs and requirements of a potentially diverse user base that would make use of a particular product, service, or system in different contexts and environments. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, & Diagrams, by Jim Kalbach, which O’Reilly Media published in May 2016. UXmatters is publishing this chapter with O’Reilly’s permission. Copyright © 2016 O’Reilly Media. All rights reserved.

Chapter 4: Initiate: Starting a Mapping Project

One of the most common questions I get in my workshops on mapping is, “How do I begin?” Aspiring mapmakers may see the immediate value in these techniques, yet they have barriers getting started.

Getting stakeholder buy-in is a common challenge. I’ve been fortunate to have had opportunities to create diagrams of all kinds and have found that stakeholders see the value in mapping only after the process is complete. As a result, initiating an effort requires convincing them up front. Read More

In a prior article I wrote for UXmatters, “Presenting UX Research Findings Using the Jobs to Be Done Framework,” I discussed the benefits of using the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework when sharing findings from generative UX research. The article described how the organizational components and the corresponding artifacts of the JTBD method—that is, the Jobs Atlas—empower stakeholders to develop an empathetic understanding of users and help UX researchers make granular, tactical decisions. In the article, I posited that these methods and artifacts offer a better way of providing usable research findings to stakeholders than other methods of disseminating the results of deep-dive, generative, user research—particularly personas.

This last point has inspired some feedback from colleagues and other UX professionals who are already comfortable with creating personas and prickled at the suggestion that JTBD can provide the advantages of these structures with fewer of their inherent weaknesses. As a result, I decided to write this article, which provides a detailed discussion that focuses primarily on the advantages that the JTBD perspective affords over personas. Read More