We attended a UIE Virtual Seminar, “The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization on the Same Page” by Tamara Adlin. In a nutshell, we learned the importance of creating personas in order to organize and design a Web site that is user friendly. Although the seminar was targeted towards a corporate audience, the messages still apply to higher education.

Twitter Snapshot

Twitter provided an excellent recap of the UIE Virtual Seminar. All of these tweets came from #uievs, mostly from @whitneyhess and @tigerfork.

New Vocab

  • “Corporate Underpants: When your org structure shows on your Web site”
  • “Swoop and Poop: When executives fly over the project and crap all over it, then fly away”
  • “Barnacle Based Design: A few years ago it got designed, since then barnacles have grown on — clogging up the works”
  • “Marketing vs. Design Personas: Marketing drives eyeballs to your product, product design moves those eyeballs around once they arrive”
  • “Use the term Ad-hoc personas NOT target audiences because marketing tends to get turfy”

Persona Rules

  • Persona rule #1: “If you don’t have clear goals, don’t bother”
  • Persona rule #2: “The execs *must* be involved from the start.”
  • Persona rule #5: “Use tools that *force* people to use the personas.”
  • Persona rule #6: “Create stories, not solutions. This story crosses functional areas, product descriptions, politics, etc. Personas get you out of your own heads, talking to each other”

Great Quotes

  • “Most companies aren’t suffering from lack of data. They’re suffering from lack of focus.”
  • “Your execs aren’t hiding their goals from you. They don’t even really know them! They’re your #1 user, guide them thru the process”
  • “A Website is like a party where it’s loud and people are yelling at you saying ‘look over here’, ‘no look over here”
  • Fill in the blank: “If we don’t make ________ ridiculously happy, we’ve failed.” That really gets people talking
  • “If exec team can’t agree on the priority of the personas, how are you ever going to design a product they believe in?”
  • “Pet projects/features fall to the bottom like rocks” [in describing weight and prioritization of features for personas]
  • “Oh, by the way” what we can do for her that she wouldn’t even think to ask for. This loose structure is helpful. Keep the important stuff, the reason she came to the site, front and center. Marketing and related items can go on the “Oh, by the way” side bar.
  • “No more flashing widgets that spin!” That drives us “Coo-coo-nutty”
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