Tuesday May 18, 2010, 8:13

Creating a model of a user (persona) for usability testing

All interfaces are created for specific audience. In order to create a user friendly environment, designers have to understand who they create an interface for. The easiest and most effective way is to create a persona, who will represent an average user of our product.

It is like writing a script for a movie and it is fun. During a process of creating such a character we have to decide about all details, such as: name, sex, age, occupation, marital status, temper etc. All facts matter! The next step is to put our hero into some difficult but real situation in which the person has to use our interface. By imaging how the character will act in such a circumstances and what kind of difficulties he/she can meet, designers learn how to design more user friendly interface for a particular project.

An example: we create a website, an eCommerce site to sell eyeglasses. Our character is an older, rich person with a vision problem, siting in his fancy apartment in Manhattan. Right away a good designers can assume: "hmm... big font is needed. However, since he doesn't care about the price, a font size of this element can be nough small to don't let him see it clearly ;). The client of ours sells preatty expensive eyeglasses."

Creating a model of a user (persona) for usability testing

, created on Tuesday May 18, 2010, 8:13, article tagged with keywords: model of a user, persona, Paper prototyping, web design, website, usability testing,

Tags: model of a user, persona, Paper prototyping, web design, website, usability testing,

Creating a model of a user (persona) for usability testing

, related articles:

Opera - there are browsers worse than IE | Blog/News | Sunday December 13, 2009 5:00
Few reasons: - problem with displaying images, in...
New York Times will Charge for Online Access | Blog/News | Wednesday January 20, 2010 13:16
The New York Times is going to charge readers for ...
Entrepreneur.com writes about a website from our portfolio! | Blog/News | Saturday January 23, 2010 20:19
Royal Deer Design is working with MV Sport on the ...
Website loading time | Blog/News | Wednesday February 03, 2010 10:47
According to a new study from Gomez (the company w...
Job Search Websites | Blog/News | Saturday February 06, 2010 9:09
Monster Worldwide (the owner of monster.com) had a...

Website Design | Articles/Encyclopedia | Sunday January 17, 2010 17:44
Web design (Website Design). Web design it is a se...
Bounce Rate | Articles/Encyclopedia | Friday February 26, 2010 21:51
Bounce rate - a phrase used in website site traffi...