Week 2 Using Scenarios and Personas to Understand Your Customers' Needs

Hi, everyone.Today, I want to introduce you about an article, called "Using Scenarios and Personas to Understand Your Customers' Needs".

The link is http://webmasterresources.suite101.com/article.cfm/user_experience_design

In the article, it points out that defining personas and creating scenarios can help the website team map the customer's needs to the website and the business requirements. So, the whole website design produced can satisfy the customers' needs.

When writing personas, one of the important things is to define one for each target group of audience. How to do it? Just concentrate on the primary target users we defined, then we can minimize the number of personas. For each persona, it can include:

1. Context - what the user wants to do in the site


2. Outcome - what the user wants to achieve in the site


3. Assumptions - what the user expects to do / have in the site
   

In my opinion, when there are so many personas to represent the users, it will only complicate the website development. Concentrating on the primary target users is a good idea to have a user-centered design, since those personas are representative enough.

When creating scenarios, we should focus on the activities the users might do first. Then, think about where the user might interact with our business, what services we can provide to them and what information they need to have. I think these processes are helpful, because the scenarios created can describe the user's interaction with the site if we follow those process to do. Hence, it helps to define the design's direction.

All in all, personas and scenarios are useful techniques to help us to understand our target users. They can provide us a clear picture of design direction and lead us to build a successful website.