Empathy tools: Artifacts in the UX process
Crafting User-Centric Experiences: Navigating Empathy Tools in the UX Journey
Artifacts are the documents that design teams craft to collect, organize, and present information throughout the UX process. In this section, we'll introduce you to several key artifacts: user personas, scenarios, user stories, and storyboards. Additionally, we'll explore the processes employed by UX/UI designers to create these artifacts.
User Personas
A user persona serves as a model or character representing a potential user of your website or app. These personas assist design teams in keeping the end users at the forefront during product development. Originating in marketing during the mid-1990s, personas play a crucial role in the user experience research stage of software development. By continually focusing on their target users, product teams ensure that their designed product aligns with users' needs and requirements.
We recognize that multiple user types can interact with a website or app. Developing user personas helps in identifying these diverse user groups, including considerations like age range and social status. User research serves as the initial step in creating user personas. Through methods such as observing user behavior and conducting interviews, UX designers gain insights into user motivations and preferences.
Conducting Customer Interviews
For effective insight gathering, aim to interview a minimum of five individuals. When you begin to notice recurring information, it indicates that you've likely gathered sufficient data. Additionally, leverage any existing information or assumptions about your customers to supplement your research findings.
Making Assumptions
For products with a history, draw upon accumulated knowledge to make informed assumptions about customers. However, ensure these assumptions are later substantiated with research findings to maintain accuracy.
Using Web Analytics
Web analytics tools provide valuable quantitative data on user behavior. While they offer insights into user actions, they do not provide insights into underlying motivations. Thus, it remains essential to complement analytics with direct user feedback to gain a comprehensive understanding of user behavior and preferences.
Creating a customer persona group
When you finish your research, you sort the gathered information into groups representing different types of customers. From these groups, you create individual user personas focusing on the primary needs and main concerns of the most important customer group.
First, you give your persona a name, an image, demographics, and a quote summarizing their main concern. These details make your persona memorable and help the design team understand who they are designing for. Then, you add personal background information and a brief biography. After that, you outline the user's psychological profile, including their needs, interests, motivations, and pain points.
This process helps you understand why users behave the way they do and why they might want to use your product. For example, Tilly in our previous example might prioritize speed when using a product. When creating user personas, it's essential to consider the context of your product and focus on creating realistic characters without including unnecessary details that won't impact the final design.
User Stories
A user story is a short description that defines who the user is, what they need, and why they need it. Each user persona typically has one user story. User stories follow a simple format:
"As a (type of user), I want (a goal) for (some reason)."
Type of user: This refers to the end-user or their role in the application. For instance, "As an online banking customer."
Goal: This describes the action the user wants to take in the application. For example, "I want to add a payee to my account."
Reason: This explains the desired outcome or value the user expects from the action. For instance, "so that I can transfer money to the payee."
For example, a user story could be: "As an online banking customer, I want to add a payee to my account, so I can transfer money to the payee."
User stories help document useful information about users, including their needs and motivations, and aid the development team in estimating the time needed to deliver the final product.
Scenarios
A scenario is a situation that illustrates how users interact with your website or app. It describes the user's motivations, tasks, and the question they need answered. Scenarios also suggest possible ways to achieve these goals and can be applied to various target users. They can also be broken down into use cases, describing the sequence of tasks a user performs.
For instance, a scenario could describe how a user transfers money to a payee using a mobile device while commuting to work. Scenarios help stakeholders understand the intended user experience and bridge communication gaps between creative and business thinking. They assist the design team in imagining the best solution to a user's problem.
Storyboards
A storyboard visually represents how a user will interact with a product. It can be in the form of sketches, illustrations, screenshots, slideshows, animations, or live demos.
Storyboarding is an excellent way to communicate design ideas visually to teams, stakeholders, and end-users.
How to create a storyboard
To create a storyboard, set the scene by defining:
your persona,
the environment (where the persona is) and
the plot (what they want to achieve).
Then you begin to sketch out the basic idea for each scene and build it up with as many interactions as you want.
Summary
In this reading, you discovered that the first thing you need to do when designing for your users is to understand them better. You do this by doing things like talking to them, watching how they interact with things, and using various methods to measure their behaviors. You looked closely at empathy tools, which are basically tools that help you understand how your users feel and what they need. Specifically, you learned about user personas, scenarios, user stories, and storyboards.
The important thing to remember with these tools is that you should keep track of all the information you gather. This will help you later when you're actually creating things for your users. Having this data to refer back to will also give you confidence in the decisions you make. By using user personas, user stories, scenarios, and storyboards, you can learn a lot about your users. This knowledge will guide you in making products that they'll really love. Essentially, every effort you make to understand your users better brings you closer to making something they'll find easy and enjoyable to use.