I use personas to support the development of the University of Edinburgh's corporate Content Management System and associated services. A significant challenge is to try to ensure that all members of the team understand and empathise with the personas that represent our CMS user group. This session (first presented February 2014 at a Web Publishing Community session) outlines activities I use to help foster shared understanding within the team and wider group of stakeholders.

1. Putting personas to work
How to ensure they live beyond the initial
enthusiasm and interest
Neil Allison
University Website Programme
Web Publishers Community, February 2014

2. Overview
1. What’s a persona?
2. Bringing personas to life: Activities, tips,
experiences
3. Why persona projects fail
Questions?

3. 1. What’s a persona?
• Personas are essentially made-up people
– Reflecting key traits and attitudes
• They help personalise a large, diverse group
• They’re typically based on:
– Data generated by user research
– Knowledge of a customer base or user group

4. Personas bring focus
The User Is Always Right
by Steve Mulder
http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

5. Personas build empathy
The User Is Always Right
by Steve Mulder
http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

6. Personas encourage consensus
The User Is Always Right
by Steve Mulder
http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

7. Personas bring efficiencies
The User Is Always Right
by Steve Mulder
http://amzn.to/1ywMMOm

8. Summary: why use personas?
• Better shared understanding of users’ behaviour,
attitudes and needs
• Better communication across development &
support teams
– “What would Olive use this feature for?”
– “Would Terry understand this guidance?”
• Building a shared vision of who we’re working for
and why

9. Our experience
• 2008 – Prospective student & parent investigation with
SRA & International Office
• 2009 – First version of Polopoly user personas
• 2010 – Prospective PG online UX project
• 2011 – PG project phase 2 with schools
• 2013 – CMS user personas for Drupal project
• 2013/4 – New arrival UG and prospective visiting
students for Student Experience Project

10. CMS user personas
How the University Website
Programme represents you

11. Olive the occasional user
• Wants to avoid web publishing tasks where
possible.
• No engagement with support and community;
doesn’t see herself as a web-publisher. Feels
the only help is her colleagues.
• Reactive – only edits when unavoidable.
• Little or no confidence in web publishing.
• Just wants to dump content into CMS as
initially drafted.
Technical
Time for
publishing
Frequent user of
CMS
Non-technical
No time for
publishing
Infrequent user of
CMS
“It all seemed quite straightforward at
the training session…”  Basic edits to existing content
 Adding new pages with basic elements to
existing structures
TYPICAL TASKS
 Every time she needs to perform a task in
the CMS, it feels like learning how to do
it from scratch
PAIN
POINTS
 More colleagues publishing webpages, so
more people to ask for help (or to pass
the work on to!)
BENEFIT
OF CMS
If at all!

12. Ed the everyday editor
• Wants to complete publishing tasks as
quickly and easily as possible
• May engage with community events if
prompted. Uses support wiki but prefers
email or phone.
• Mainly reactive – directed by others.
• Confident with day-to-day web publishing
activities.
• CMS structure is good because it makes it
harder to break things.
Technical
Time for
publishing
Frequent user of
CMS
Non-technical
No time for
publishing
Infrequent user of
CMS
 Creates and edits web-pages
 Simple reorganisation of subsections
 Takes on new features when prompted,
but needs support to implement
TYPICAL TASKS
 Needs basic editorial tasks to be quick
and hassle-free
 Needs to consult support wiki for tasks
he doesn’t do frequently
PAIN
POINTS
 Likes having a support service available;
gives him more confidence in web
publishing.
 Feels his web pages look professional.
BENEFIT
OF CMS
“I just want to get the job done quickly”

13. Coleen the comms specialist
• Wants to help her unit meet their goals by
providing a professional and efficient suite of
communication channels, which includes the
website
• Engages with web publishing community.
Tries out new features independently
• Proactive –Web is part of communications
and improving it will support business.
• Confidence in range of relevant CMS
functionality.
• Wants CMS to deliver more flexible webpage
layouts
Technical
Time for
publishing
Frequent user of
CMS
Non-technical
No time for
publishing
Infrequent user of
CMS
“The website needs to keep pace
with the business & its users”
 Directly manages high profile content
 Manages site focus and structure
 Dictates who edits & publishes
TYPICAL
TASKS
 Pace of improvements to the system are
slow
 Wants CMS to keep pace with trends in
web comms and user behaviour
PAIN
POINTS
 Can do more advanced web publishing
without technical input.
 Training and support means she’s more
confident about the quality of her team’s
work
 Can share and use others’ content
BENEFIT
OF CMS

14. Terry the tech specialist
• Wants to try new things, innovate,
collaborate.
• Engages with the Technical Peer Group and
Web Publishers Community when there are
topics of interest.
• Mainly proactive. Keeps abreast of technical
trends and internal issues.
• Confident in range of web technology.
• Wants to modify the CMS to meet needs of
his unit & to experiment.
Technical
Time for
publishing
Frequent user of
CMS
Non-technical
No time for
publishing
Infrequent user of
CMS
“Central services hold back
innovation & improve too slowly”
 One-off projects covering all areas of
web-development and integration
 Emergency publishing
 Fixing others’ problems
TYPICAL TASKS
 Feels restricted by corporate CMS
 Wants to be able to customise locally
 Wants more direct access to CMS
PAIN
POINTS
 Gets to spend less time doing basic web-publishing
tasks
BENEFIT
OF CMS

15. Which persona are you?
• Spend a moment to reflect…
• Individual users are (almost) always
represented by multiple personas
– What percentage of each are you?
– What aspects do you most associate with?

16. 2. Bringing personas to life
Familiarisation exercises, Research,
Reporting, Planning & prioritising

17. Stakeholder buy-in
• Get stakeholders involved in creation
• Limit the number of personas
• Make them distinct and memorable
• Allow time for familiarisation

18. Familiarisation exercises
• A way to think about and discuss the personas
• Does everyone feel the personas would react
in the same way in a particular scenario?

19. How do we know we’re doing it properly?
When you find yourself saying:
– “I doubt Ed would ever want to do that”
And no one asks:
– “Who’s Ed?”
We’re probably getting there 

20. Behavioural matrices
Low tech High tech
Infrequent CMS use Frequent CMS use
No CMS community
engagement
High community
engagement
Reactive content mgt Proactive content mgt
• Map the four personas to each matrix
• Compare locations with the group
– Any significant differences of opinion?

21. New CMS service goals
• B - Facilitate online business for all areas of the University
• R - Be robust, resilient and scalable
• I - Support flexible and innovative web development
• D - A quality website user experience across multiple devices
• G - Be governed and managed by a central service with
inclusive, transparent processes
• E - Quick and easy for all levels of CMS user
• S - Support the generation of standards- and legislation-compliant
websites
Which goal is most important to each persona?

22. Amazon reviews
• Choose one persona
• Write a review for
– Polopoly
– The new CMS
Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk by Go Office
Genuine product & reviews:
bit.ly/amazon-wheelmate

23. Usability testing
• Recruit participants to play role of personas
or
• Use persona to steer real user recruitment

24. Competitor analysis
• Compare competitor provision with the
objective yardstick of a persona

25. Expressing your findings
• Map out persona
experiences
• Immediate and succinct
way to report research
findings
uxmatters.com
cxpartners.com

26. Scorecards for ongoing monitoring
Sample scorecard from ‘Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead’
by Lou Rosenfeld http://bit.ly/Hwjdoc
Objectively
and regularly
measure

27. Tell a story
• Easy to do with senior
stakeholders
• Easy to collaborate on
• Storytelling is an ancient
and universal activity

28. Persona-weighted
feature prioritisation
New students
site content
Persona 1 Persona 2 Persona 3 …
Checklists
Welcome guides
Money & fees
Etc…
Step 1: Score the feature:
• 2 – Persona will love this
• 1 – Sure, it’s fine. Expected
• 0 – Doesn’t affect the persona
• -1 – Persona will hate this
• Can be used for functionality,
services and content
• For existing stuff & potential new
developments
• Weight personas if some are more
important than others
Step 2: Editorial discussion:
• What do we need to do to the
feature to meet persona
expectations?
• Is this feature adding value?

29. Expressing different requirements
The CMS…
 …provides functionality to create accessible web forms to collect data from
visitors
 …can email collected form data
 …or stores & allows viewing of visitor entered data securely & in
accordance with data protection legislation
This is important to me because… Olive
I want data to be collected and viewed
easily so that our processes can be
improved.
I don’t want my site compromised.
I want enough functionality to enable me
to create forms for a variety of uses
without the need for technical help.
I don’t want to have to deal with spam
data.
Coleen
Ed Terry
I want data to be stored centrally so
that I don’t need to build and maintain
external systems.

30. Challenge new development ideas
• We believe that
– Creating this content
• For
– This persona
• Will achieve
– This outcome
• We will know when we are successful
– When we see...

31. 3. So why do personas fail?
• Stakeholders don’t understand
• Personas don’t feel real
• Personas get avoided or forgotten

32. “Essence of a Successful
Persona Project”
Jared Spool found the most important
aspects were:
– Internalizing the personas
– Creating rich scenarios
– Prioritizing the most important personas
– Involving all the stakeholders and influencers
bit.ly/uie-successful-personas

33. The final resting place
of many personas
Flickr creative commons credits:
Pindec
Vegansoldier

34. Our personas LIVE!

35. Want to learn more?
• See the wiki www.bit.ly/edinburgh-personas
• Training session coming soon – interested?

36. Thank you
Questions?