Your website can attract a wide variety of visitors. Trying to appeal to them all can be troublesome and the results can leave you with more unhappy customers than happy ones.

When user profiling, there are two very distinct ways to go; methodical and thorough with a reasoned and structured analysis, which is our typical user profiling project, or ‘quick and dirty’.

In the agile, nimble world of the modern Web, we appreciate you don’t always have the time to do things perfectly so here are three steps to help you with the quick and dirty approach.

 

Step 1. Decide on who your customers are

Break down your users into five groups, based on what they need from your site. One way to do this is with an ad hoc meeting with your team. In the meeting explain what you want, without explaining why until the end, this way you get original thinking and not prepared, canned answers.

We challenged our client Bob Barbour at the MS Society to do this. He set up a ‘flash’ meeting – putting it out as a desperate appeal for help at very short notice. He got great results as the attendees had no time to ‘over think’ the exercise and so didn’t try to serve their own objective by pushing one user group over another.

Don’t underestimate the challenge of only coming up with five user groups, it will be hard, but it is important to set a limit to help you focus. If you come up with too many groups, look at how you can merge some together.

 

Step 2. Come up with questions for each group

Now come up with questions for each group that they are likely to ask when looking at your website. Make sure the questions are actionable, i.e. “Is this company reputable?” Then, focus on what are the most important questions for that user group.

Choose the top three priority questions for each user group, and focus on these. For example, if we did this for our website, it might look something like this:

Group 1 – Asked to investigate usability suppliers by their boss
1.    Do they appear trustworthy and competent?
2.    What is different about their approach?
3.    How much will it cost?

Group 2 – Understand more about usability testing
1.     What is usability testing?
2.    What else should I consider?
3.    Can I do it myself?

 

Step 3. Focus on the high priority users

From your five groups, select the two most important, as a primary and secondary group. These should be your number one business priority to serve, i.e. the users that will lead to you reaching your business goals for the site.

 

Next Steps

After completing your quick and dirty approach to user profiling, you will have a better idea of who your essential customers are, what they need and where to focus your efforts on your website to help your users.

We will discuss how to use the profiles that you have created in a future article, but for the time being you can use your new user profiles to focus your website planning on addressing user needs instead of internal guesses.

What methods have you used to get a better picture of your users?

Related service:  User Journey Design

We’ve spoken to three different companies in the past couple of weeks who are all recruiting a ‘UX practitioner’.  Yet when we asked what they were looking  for, we found that each of them is looking for a different role. So we started to question the value of the term User Experience (UX) which seems to have become an over-used label to refer to everything from design, to internet marketing.

As a term, user experience is too broad and lacks clear definition. In fact, there is no agreed definition of what user experience is even within the UX community. There are some excellent examples of people trying to explain what user experience is and what it is not , but in terms of a role within an organisation it seems too broad to be useful because everyone contributes and a user experience practitioner can’t control every aspect of a site.

Before the term ‘user experience’ rose to popularity, the web industry relied upon terms such as information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing. They may not be as sexy or marketable as user experience, but they provide a much more structured way to consider roles and responsibilities for an organisation keen to improve users’ experience. Let’s look at each in turn:

Information Architecture
The origins of Information architecture lie in library sciences and is defined as “the art and science of organising and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability” by the IA institute

Typically, an information architect will help you to restructure, categorise and label information into a structure users will find easy to understand. A better way to explain it is provided by Christina Wodke:  “You know when you’re on a website and you see a bunch of navigation choices to click on? I’m the one who decided what the choices are, what they are called and where they take you when you click”

Interaction Design
Interaction design comes from the academic discipline of Human Computer Interaction. The IxDA provide the following definition: “Interaction design defines the structure and behaviors of interactive products and services and user interactions with those products and services”.

An interaction designer works out what the user goals is, and then decides what tools users need achieve their goal as quickly and easily as possible. This is explained further by Bill Verplank in a Video on YouTube

Usability Testing
Usability Testing or Usability Engineering  “is a discipline that provides structured methods for achieving usability in user interface design during product development” according to Deborah Mayhew in her excellent book The Usability Engineering Lifecycle

Usability Engineering also has its roots in Human-Computer Interaction and is a critical tool in ensuring a website meets the needs and expectations of its users. According to Jakob Neilsen, usability testing has three core activities “get representative customers, ask them to perform realistic tasks, and shut up and let them do the talking”

So, before you recruit a UX practitioner or ask for help with user experience take a moment to consider what type of help you are seeking and which discipline this would fall into. Bear in mind that there are lots of organisations like us who can provide all three services, but when recruiting or searching for a freelancer bear in mind that a good usability engineer isn’t necessarily a good interaction designer, and a good information architect won’t necessarily know how to design, facilitate and interpret usability research.

Related services: Usability testing, and User journey design