Sensing Or Intuitive: Using Personas To Develop A User Interface
In Meyers-Briggs typology, as it pertains to information there are two types, “Sensing(S)” and “Intuitive(I)”. Neither is right or wrong they are just how we prefer to digest information.
Sensing personalities prefer the up-front and obvious as where Intuitives get more from reading between the lines and problem solving. Something to consider when developing your UI for the users who will be interacting with it. Will it be a new, innovative navigation or will it be a step-by-step process with big orange buttons and plenty of instruction. Singling out which type is most likely to be your audience is a great first step to establishing how your UI will flow.
Creating personas will help you decide which type will be more likely to use your interface, and thus how basic, or feature-rich your UI can or should be.
Personas aid in developing your UX by creating fictional users and establishing what behaviors they have and what they want to get out of using your UI. The tricky part is ensuring these personas are realistic and not just created to ultimately align with your goals. You might even try using someone you know and trust to give you their honest input. Preferably this person would be in your target audience. You wouldn’t want to get into the mind of your grandmother if your selling skateboards! (no offense grandma, you can still shred a mean half-pipe).
In short, creating personas will help you plan your UI and UX strategy by helping you decide who will be using your user interface. Stick to your personas and don’t change them to align with your goals. Make the changes to the UI to align with what the user wants to do. You can change the UI, but you can not change the user.
Jeff is a Sr. Art Director at HSN.com. When he isn’t being an evangelist of User Experience, UI Design and Best Usability Practices you can find him floating around the Twittersphere or perpetually tweaking his WordPress Blog.
Follow on Twitter: @fuelinterface | @inetwebguy
The naive in me keeps wondering that its hard to just put your customers in such simple groups and then make detailed landing page or conversion site. How do you do this if you are startup – when you are still in the customer discovery process?
You must have some idea whom your trying to target, yes? Age range, male, female, ethnicity, region, specific profession, animal lover, etc..
But yes you are right, personas are derived from discovery. Typically you should already have hard data about who your user is before creating personas, but there should also be some clear understanding of who your ultimately targeting before you begin.
Define, Create, Analyze, Iterate(evolve).
When I talked about not changing the persona, I may have been unclear. I was referring more to not changing them to align with internal business goals and didn’t mean to insinuate once defined they could not change.