Thinking Like Your User

In my previous entry, I explained how customer interviews were used to create personas and how the persona is who we had in mind while designing our website for Lincoln Savings Bank (LSB). The next step is to start thinking like our persona, so we not only know our user’s goals but also how they go about achieving those goals. We do this by creating a Mental Model and Context Scenario. As a reminder here is the persona we had been working with:

Mental Models were perhaps the most challenging step for our group, we had trouble differentiating between LSB’s goals and our personas goals. Our first few attempts were simply listing out the actions of the persona and the requirements of the website when what we needed to focus on the thought process our persona would be going through. This would later help us when designing the website giving us an idea of how it should be set up, where the user is going to be looking, and how the users would be navigating the site. Here is our final Mental Model after several attempts to represent the personas thought process:

The last thing we needed before jumping into design was the Context Scenario, essentially a short story of how our persona will be using the website we design. Writing context scenarios takes a bit of creative writing skill and something to consider while writing them are the attitude of the persona, their level of experience with technology, and how easily distracted they might be. I handled the majority of writing context scenarios and prepared a few for each of our personas, and this one here is for our primary persona:

In my next entry, we’ll finally be diving into the design aspects of the projects and will be picking up with information architecture and wire framing.