From User Data to Great Design: Practical Tools for Creating a Powerful User Experience

• San Francisco: Thursday, April 5

John Pruitt
Full-Day Training Course

Understanding your users is the core principle of user-centered design. Usability and market research both promote various methods to capture and make sense of data about your users. But how do you get from user data—even well-understood data—to excellent user experiences?

To do this, you must translate complex user data into a useful format that can be easily consumed and embraced by the myriad people on your development team.  User “personas” offer an excellent method for accomplishing this. User personas are fictitious, yet realistic and detailed, descriptions of target users that help you encapsulate data and use that data to make sound development decisions.

Personas and other user representations are now commonplace in many organizations. Yet, exactly how to engage your team to use personas effectively toward design and development is still largely elusive.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use personas and similar abstractions as a central tool to help you make critical product decisions and inspire design throughout the development process. We’ll discuss alternative, highly practical methods for product planning, design, and evaluation that encourage a user-centered approach to product design, including:

• Persona-driven competitive analysis and brainstorming
• Persona-weighted feature analysis
• Scenario creation – telling your product’s story through the eyes of your personas
• Persona focused Design Mapping & Wireframing

You’ll leave this session with the skills needed to use personas to solve problems—and inspire creativity!—in your own organizations and processes.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Use personas during the product planning, design, development, and release processes
• Plan your product features according to the experiences you want to create
• Prioritize feature ideas in terms of each feature’s value to your key users
• Examine and redesign key experiences for your target users using practical, easy-to-implement methods

Course Outline

• Collecting and analyzing user data to drive product planning
  • Data in software: Where it comes from, and what we typically do with it
  • Methods for translating data into information: Personas, user profiles and archetypes, scenarios, and case studies; summaries of field research and use cases
• Getting from data to design: New methods for using data in feature generation and definition
  • Discussion: Where do feature requirements come from in your organization?
  • Persona-driven competitive analysis: Evaluating the competition through your personas’ eyes to identify key opportunities
  • Hands-on Exercise: Persona-driven competitive analysis
  • Persona-driven brainstorming: Generating product and feature ideas based on deep knowledge and key users
  • Hands-on Exercise: Persona-driven feature brainstorm
• Managing feature madness: Using data to plan and scope your product
  • Extracting and prioritizing a “laundry list” of features
  • Hands-on Exercise: Using the persona-weighted feature matrix to prioritize features
• Exploring design ideas for your product with user data
  • Translating features into scenarios: What are scenarios? How do you write them? How can you use scenarios and personas to enhance design?
  • Hands-on Exercise: Writing a good scenario
  • Design Mapping: Using sticky notes to create, iterate, and improve user experiences (before you design any interfaces)
  • Going from design maps to design: Site mapping and wire framing; using design maps to communicate with the development team; revisiting design maps during the development process
  • Hands-on Exercise: Using Design Mapping to create a new end-to-end experience for a persona
  • Letting data drive (and validate) some aesthetic choices: Mood boards and style explorations
• Maintaining focus on data throughout the design and development process
  • The scenario collection spreadsheet: Assessing the relative importance of features and functions
  • Using personas (or user profiles) to evaluate your design: Personas and usability-test participant recruiting, using personas to report test findings
• Session summary
• Time permitting, we’ll discuss your projects and specific ideas to help you “hit the ground running!”

Note: This session does not cover how to create personas.

Format

This full-day tutorial features lectures and interactive exercises.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This tutorial is intended for user-experience professionals (information developers, interaction designers, usability specialists, technical writers, business analysts, and product managers) who want to learn how to turn information about users into well-designed products.

Participants should be generally familiar with the persona concept and user research, but need not have directly created or used personas previously.

Instructor

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows (including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the Windows Tablet PC and the small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist for the U.S. Navy doing simulation and training research. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with co-author Tamara Adlin), and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry events.