Boxes and Arrows: Comments on stories by Andrea Wiggins

Mark Dykeman — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:55:25 GMT

“In practice, I think it’s better to have the user goals determined before you start looking at web analytic data.” I couldn’t agree with you more. As an Analyst, I’m buggered (and not in the good way) without user and business goals.

Isn’t the real goal of personas to connect us folk with them folk – the users? And inspire – and I think that is the key word – visual designers, interactive designers and team members in general to do our very best job to meet the needs of real people. To that end, Personas can’t be ‘numbery’ – they have to drive empathy, sympathy and understanding. They can’t be segments, or demographic profiles

That’s the main reason I think you never read personas that start off “john q smith works at x-company and is a real bastard.” No one would ever care about meeting his needs.

Note: Robert Williams is right that the analytics data can be a very good source of hypotheses. It’s one of the best sources of hypotheses. But then you’ve got to go out and test them, which circularly takes you back to qualitative material.

Paula Thornton — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:16:25 GMT

There have always been, three types of personas: actual, factual and fictional. Which you use is tactically determined based on a number of situational-specific factors.

Robert Williams — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:32:35 GMT

What about personas from analytics reports based on time periods and considering other business data? I find that filtering, say, a keyword report by time periods and doing some cross referencing of other business trends data can be quite revealing about the “who” and beneficial for doing some analysis to hypothosize about the “why”—whether this data gets used for creating personas or not.

If you’re lucky enough to be an a place that has the resources, the hardest part is breaking down that wall that exists between web analytics or UX design resources and market research resources.

Alistair Harper — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:35:59 GMT

Although initially a bit dubious about this approach, I think I can see times when it can be useful.

Props to Mark Dykeman for reminding us that analytics tell us ‘what’ is going on not ‘why’ it is going on. My major issue with this approach was that it seemed to make inferences on why people come to a site based upon analytics data. These inferences could easily be flawed, as Jonathan suggests.

But as Andrew asserts, personas are about communication. Grounding personas in analytics data could make them more acceptable to some audiences, and counter the argument that they are just ‘magicked’ out of thin air.

I don’t believe in a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach. And this could definitely be a useful approach for some projects.

Robert Skrobe — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:06:25 GMT

Whoops. I posted my comment too soon.
The second paragraph was missing the following sentence, after ”... of the initiative).:
“Likewise, the common language personas are meant to facilitate between departments as part of the project process is usually overlooked, especially with certain areas of the business in constant ‘firefighting’ mode with too little staff to cover the workload. (new paragraph)”

Also, I meant ‘behavioral trends’ in that second to last paragraph.
Hmm, the comments system here needs a 5-minute edit window after posting. :)

Robert Skrobe — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:00:08 GMT

I think this article is absolutely brilliant.

I’ve been struggling with personas for a long, long time. Not in terms of creating them or leveraging them in my work as an information architect, but with integrating them as a communication tool amongst teams.

Like all things with political overtones and buy-in aspects, personas have problems. First, from where they originate from, and second, how they’re written. Creative departments I’ve worked with in the past would discount personas altogether because of who originally crafted them (this includes persona creation by committee, where egos tend to dominate the direction of the initiative). There are usually conflicts on how any qualitative information can be meaningful to the business, much less start a common dialog about user goals, when departmental goals around results take precedent.

However, analytics and hard numbers have ties to revenue and profits, especially with companies that rely on ad-serving plays to illustrate market share (like my current employer). Analytics touches marketing, sales, execs, and project teams, and it’s usually indicated as a success metric in requirements documents (i.e. KPI’s, % uplift from baseline, etc.). Thus, if personas can be derived from this data at its base via the suggestions in this article, I think you have a great blueprint to work from.

I think with Step 5, I wanted a bit more detail on techniques or methods (even more examples) to tie in qualitative data (if available) into the persona mix. Specifically, trends between identified user types based on demographics that could tie into analytic data. If the parallels can be identified and matched, you have some good gateways to work on the ‘why’ as Andrew put it.

Thank you very much for posting this article. I know I’m coming across as a fan boy, but I can’t stress how long it’s been since I’ve seen something compelling about persona creation enough to remark on it.

Andrea Wiggins — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:05:39 GMT

Mark, your comments are very astute. You said, “Web Analytics data answers ‘what,’ not ‘why.’ Personas are about the why.” I agree with this – and am suggesting using the “what” to contribute to thinking about “why.” I think the part where I described a way to think about user goals as a starting point may be confusing the point here. Is that the main point of contention? For the sake of example, I didn’t want to assume that everyone can start with research-based user goals. In practice, I think it’s better to have the user goals determined before you start looking at web analytic data.

Andrea Wiggins — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:27:26 GMT

(whoops, I meant to address Andrew, not Alec, on that last paragraph!)

Andrea Wiggins — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:19:39 GMT

Thanks for the comments, folks!

Jonathan, the technique doesn’t make assumptions about the rightness or wrongness of the site’s current instantiation. In fact, I would generally assume it’s not optimal! This technique is less about the behavioral end than most of us would like, and that’s largely because of the tool’s robustness. I would not recommend using Google Analytics to dig into user goals; you can really do some wonders toward that end with the more fully-featured vendor solutions, but for this article I was specifically constraining the technique to a widely accessible tool that pretty much everyone can use. I wouldn’t speculate on why people were viewing the “About Us” page because there are lots of possible reasons for that one – but with something like “Classes” or “Auditions,” you can make more reasonable assumptions about user interests, if not goals. The page popularity statistics are among the least solid to interpret for this purpose, which is why I emphasize taking advantage of more directly interpretable information like geographic locations, browser/OS, and new/returning visitor status. This is hard data about real users and I think there’s a lot of value to be had from taking advantage of every data source we can get.

Alec, I love the approach you describe! I have made use of web analytics to extract user behavior “in the wild” for similar uses, and I think it’s a very powerful approach. The main difference is the source of the user behavior data, and every data source has its advantages and disadvantages. Again, for digging into the behavioral aspects, I don’t think Google Analytics is a strong enough tool. To use the more sophisticated web analytics applications for this purpose, it’s important to work with a web analytics professional for validity reasons – they know the strengths and weaknesses of the data collection methods and analysis tools, which is important for interpreting the data.

And you’re right – this was specifically written for all the folks who don’t have access to the preferred methods of collecting user data. Even when you have all of those user research data streams available, I think there’s value in bringing in the web analytic data. User interviews and surveys provide great information but there are notorious problems with self-reporting, so it may be useful to verify self-reported behavior against actual usage. The research world is quite fond of triangulating data, but I haven’t seen much emphasis on this type of validation for UX design.

Alec, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head by saying that personas are communication tools. What the persona communicates will depend in part on what you put into it; my opinion is that a greater variety of sources for user data will help you generate a stronger persona. This technique is simply a way to use what you have, even when you haven’t got much to use, which is often the case – as you point out, it can be really hard to get support for qualitative data collection.

Mark Dykeman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:46:13 GMT

As a Web Analytics person, I’m all for using data as much as possible. I love the data.

But not in personas. Generally, there are two groups of people who should not make guesses about user motivations and needs: Clients and Web professionals. Clients are too embedded in their business and all too easily absorb the culture and organizational opinions about what their users need. Generally, unless they’ve been doing a lot of research, these opinions are just wrong. Web professionals shouldn’t guess about what non-professionals think about a site. We are *far* too embedded in our own culture and milieu to be able to guess what someone who does not use the web regularly thinks or wants. And we also develop institutional knowledge and biases of our own.

We always have to do research. And research does not have to be expensive. If you’re a little guy, find six people who you don’t know very well and ask them. Paper prototype, show them the site, go down to Starbucks and ask a stranger what they think. It won’t be statistically valid, but as anyone in the practice who has done research knows, you get good data from only a few people. Sampling more than ten is a waste of time.

Our training as professionals makes us great at coming up with solutions, but it makes us less able to understand the customer. Personas are there to represnt the customer: not a demographic, not a perfect model of a perfect customer. Web Analytics data answers “what,” not “why.” Personas are about the why.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:09:15 GMT

Incidentally, I’ve just been reading Spool’s blog post of the next day, which says some things relating to partially-supported personas, ie those that are not entirely made up, but not based on hard data either: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/15/personas-vs-use…)

Andrew Otwell — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:13:27 GMT

Alec wrote: “I’d recommend this approach to someone who doesn’t have the research capabilities, time or budget to do the online surveys.”

In other words, nearly everyone, including probably nearly all readers of this article. It’s interesting to read this along with the discussion going on at UIE.com about personas the last couple days (http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/14/crappy-personas…). It’s so rare to work on a project where there’s time, budget, or willingness to do any qualitative user research.

One of the key things about personas, I think, is that personas aren’t primarly a research technique, but a communication tool. So if you’re “only” able to synthesize assumptions, folklore, myths, and a little data about your users into a format that anyone can read and get something out of, you’re still making communication happen better.

Alec Cochrane — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 02:29:23 GMT

Interesting concept Andrea, whilst I think the sentiment is good, the application of this would only work in situations where there is no budget for user surveys to find out why people are visiting the “about us” page. Also nice use of integrating what little qualitative data there is at hand to manipulate the personas – I’d recommend this approach to someone who doesn’t have the research capabilitiies, time or budget to do the online surveys.

Although it does bring me on nicely to an approach we adopted recently. Whilst our research team went away and conducted online surveys and interviews to work up the personas, we also went into overdrive and used some previous research to come up with some user behaviours. We then cross referenced the behaviours with the personas to show how these ‘people’ were interacting with the site and how they were getting there. This helped give a bit of context to the Business who couldn’t quite work out how we were going to link a persona to the nitty gritty of x million users having various different touch points with the site.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:33:24 GMT

Interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen a description of personas being constructed from anonymous web analytics data. I’m a bit unsure how defensible this approach is though. For one thing, basing personas on this data implies there is nothing wrong with the design of the site as it is. For example, the data might show 60% of people going to the “about us” page, but that doesn’t tell you what their intention was, nor whether they got the information they wanted by going there. Would there be a chance that you would create a persona who goes to the “about us” page for a reason completely different from the reality?

Nice touch in using a self-referential persona though (somebody using GA). It fried my brains a bit at first, but it’s actually quite clever.

Andrea Wiggins — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:34:45 GMT

Masood,
Austin has it nailed. My agency work experience has involved the discovery of site goals as a primary part of the site development process. Even if the organization already has goals for their site, they often require adjustment for a new site structure and features. For example, if having 3 or more pageviews in an average visit was a goal metric, a change to a different site technology could interfere by invisibly adding another pageview to every visit, and the original goal metric would need to be adjusted accordingly. In my experience, setting site goals is often a “committee” activity, so I definitely agree that the UX practitioner shouldn’t be defining objectives independently.