Linknote — — 81 words

User experience

Work:

From personas to behaviour modes — Website and Communications Blog

Lightbulb

This post on my team’s blog outlines why and how we have moved away from using personas to behavioural archetypes.

Existing personas had served the team well for over 10 years. But with our work to reimagine the future of our web services, and our attention turning to the development of a new Web Publishing Platform, we recognised that these old personas needed to evolve.

Now, our archetypes focus on people’s behaviours — who does what, how they do it, and why.

Linknote — — 118 words

User experience — User research

Describing personas — Indi Young — Indi’s Essays

Personas are one of the most popular techniques in the user experience toolkit, but they also remain among the most controversial. It is often still unclear to some what value personas can bring, and how to avoid the pitfalls of bad personas.

This article brings one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen of how to make good personas. It is a lengthy but must-read article if you make personas and want to make them work.

This article is particularly useful at explaining why obsessing over demographics is bad, and why you should instead focus on “thinking styles”.

Statements-of-fact, preferences, and demographics frequently serve as distracting barriers. They kick off all kinds of subconscious reactions in team members minds.

Linknote — — 109 words

Technology — User experience — User research

Work:

Presenting findings of our user research for the API Service

User experience research for the University of Edinburgh’s API Service

I have been leading some user research for a project at the University of Edinburgh to develop API Service. [This post on the University Website Programme blog outlines the steps we went through in the first phase of the research](https://website-programme-blog.is.ed.ac.uk/user-experience-research-for-the-api-service/). This included interviewing developers, running workshops, and developing personas and journey maps.

This has been a successful and rewarding project. It has been particularly interesting for me to do some UX work that wasn’t necessarily to do with a website. There will be a couple more blog posts about it to come.