From User Data to Great Design:
Practical Tools for Creating a Powerful User Experience
- Chicago: Wednesday, November 5
- Amsterdam: Thursday, November 19
Tamara Adlin
John Pruitt
Full-Day Tutorial
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 data—even well-understood data—to excellent user experiences?
Once you’ve translated the data into useful information, you must translate this information into products that will satisfy users. 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. However, exactly how 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 user-centered methods for product planning, design, and evaluation that encourage a data-driven approach to product design, including:
- Persona-driven competitive analysis and brainstorming
- Reality and Design Mapping
- Persona-weighted feature analysis
You’ll leave this session with the skills needed to use personas to solve problems—and inspire creativity!—in your own organizations and processes.
Note: this session does not cover how to create personas. To learn more about creating personas, we recommend taking the companion course, The Persona Lifecycle: Creating User Personas from Data.
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 re-design 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!”
Format
This full-day tutorial features lecture and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of all 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.
See Also
For those unfamiliar with personas, we recommend taking The Persona Lifecycle: Creating User Personas from Data prior to this course. Although the two courses are designed to work independently, together they provide a full set of practical methods, tools, and hands-on experiences that will help you get from data to design—and make better product development decisions.
Instructors:
Tamara Adlin is the founder and principal of adlin, inc., a customer experience consulting company
located in Seattle, WA, and the co-author of
The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
(with John Pruitt, Microsoft). Among adlin, inc.’s, clients are Apple Computer, Facebook, PetSmart, DietTelevision, Zillow, and
Jobster, and Adlin serves on the advisory board for WetPaint and BazaarVoice. She has more than 13 years’ experience developing
user-centered design and user interface design methods. Prior to starting her own company, she managed the customer experience
team at Amazon Services, creating e-commerce solutions for online and multichannel retailers. She moved to Amazon Services from
Amazon.com, where she was a Senior Customer Experience Specialist consulting with teams across the company to invent and improve
user experiences for buyers, sellers, partners, and support professionals. Previously, she was the Human-Centered Design Lead at
Attenex Corporation, a legal services software company in Seattle, where she designed advanced document management interfaces.
Earlier in her career, Adlin led teams and designed interfaces for Web applications at Akamai Technolobies, INTERVU, and
Netpodium Corporation. She started her user experience career as an Engineering Psychologist at the Army Research Laboratory,
evaluating human factors issues associated with military systems. Adlin holds a B.A. From Vassar College and an M.S. in
technical communication from the University of Washington, where she focused on user interface design techniques and
interdisciplinary communications. Adlin has led workshops and been invited to speak all over the world on personas and other
user-centered design methods.
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
Windows versions, including Windows 98SE, 2000, XP, and Vista, as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client,
MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8); Tablet; and Ultra-Mobile PCs. 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 doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy.
Pruitt 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 eight years,
continually developing the method and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and other companies
worldwide. Pruitt co-authored the book,
The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design,
with Tamara Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic at both academic and industry events.
