Okay, this is going to sound snarky, but I'm very serious. Does your company have time to release a product that doesn't meet user needs, fails in the marketplace, and then needs to be re-thought and re-built? Because from the situation you describe, it sounds like your management is setting this product up for failure. Big time.
More helpful feedback below. On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:25 PM, erpdesigner <[email protected]> wrote: > > 1) Brainstorm Issues/problems we are trying to solve > That's a very good idea. > 2) Brainstorm user characteristics and then turn those characteristics into > a couple of personas > That's a less good idea... what I think would be more effective here would be to interview the business stakeholders about who (they think) their customers are, or at least who they are targeting. You indicated that you're working with product marketing folks here, so this shouldn't be too difficult. Note that you are *not* creating personas here... at best you're creating customer profiles. Personas evolve out of observation. These profiles that you'd be developing here would be most appropriate for driving research participant recruiting... you want to do research with people who meet this profile in order to see what personas emerge within the groups you're interested in. There is a huge caveat here though... it's entirely possible that the business has no clue who their customers actually are or who they want to be their customers. For example, I'm working on a project right now where we were originally targeting two of five audiences. We made three 15 minute phone calls to people we knew in the main target audience and we learned that they are not, in fact, customers. We learned that an audience we were specifically told to ignore by the client is in fact a major factor in making purchasing decisions. And we also learned of a completely NEW audience. Can your company afford 45 minutes of research time? : ) > 3) From the personas, brainstorms goals, and user tasks. > I would actually add two steps here... first, you're presumably working with some sort of content... some sort of noun. Video, reviews, datasheets, whatever. I would spend some time brainstorming about what VERBS could be done to that content... what are the possibilities that are out there? Then spend some time thinking (NOT brainstorming!) about the sorts of situations in which people that match your target profiles would want to manipulate/interact with your nouns. Then from there, I might take those profiles and contexts and think (NOT brainstorm!) about which verbs people that meet those profiles might want to perform based on the contexts in which they may occur > 4) Flow out the user tasks. > Sure... but again, you'll never know if you don't observe, and that's a huge risk of re-work after development, release, & failure. > 5) Start turning the tasks into a high level structure and either quickly > brainstorm on a paper some drawing around either a vertical slice of the UI > or a top level horizontal slice. > Some super lo-fi paper prototyping will be your friend here. From what you described, you know basically nothing... unsure about the users, no requirements, nothing. That's the sort of situation that lo-fi prototyping can be really useful in. It will help you determine whether you have basically the right features and if the flows are right at a macro level. It'll help you formulate an accurate overall structure. And it's real easy to change once you learn stuff and iterate through multiple concepts. But again, that's research, and you say your company isn't interested... man, your management sure loves risk! : ) > 6) After the fact, go out and find users who fit the characteristics of the > personas and either create new personas, or validate the pretend personas. > If you're planning to do this at this stage, why not do it at the beginning? Yes, you say you need wireframes by mid-December... presumably that means that people need to develop off of them. Why not make it early January and then your wireframes will be a lot more accurate than if they're based on "pretend" personas? If developers code off of inaccurate wireframes (no fault of yours!) and you find that your personas, tasks, etc. are all pretty wrong, then they'll have to go back & re-do what they just did and you'll be at the same point in the schedule as you would if you'd done the research up front. > The whole idea is to get the team to think about who the users are, think > about what the user's goals and tasks are, and create a personas that can > then drive the rapid paper prototype process. > That's great and all, but it's frought with risk. Doing this is essentially basing the whole structure of a design off of half-informed opinions. As anyone on this list can attest to, that approach leads down a very dark path. If you're planning to validate made-up personas with the target audience anyway, you might as well do it first and save yourself a lot of pain and heartache later on. I think the best approach at this point is to seriously lobby your management on this point: Research now or fail later and rebuild. Point out the impact that this would have on customer loyalty. If you bought a big software package that sucked, would you buy again from that company even if they said they fixed it? I really really hope you're able to turn them around. : ) F. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fred Beecher Sr. User Experience Consultant Evantage Consulting O: 612.230.3838 // M: 612.810.6745 IM: [email protected] (google/msn) // fredevc (aim/yahoo) T: http://twitter.com/fred_beecher ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... 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