Seagulls vs. turtles when designing information displays
When thinking about characteristics of different personas that will use your service, it often helps to think about extreme user characteristics and how they differ from each other.
For example, when thinking about learnability one can think about expert vs. novice users. Similarly, this Apple Music redesign case study describes two categorical user groups—Hoarders and Nomads—that have different ways of consuming content on the platform:
Hoarders:
Have a large library that they add to from time to time
Are more selective about what they listen to
Nomads:
Rely on playlists/curated content
Are probably already using Spotify
As the article points out, users can really be anywhere on the continuum, and we should treat these extreme cases as axes rather than dichotomies.
For example, when designing information dashboards for business users, one analogy has helped me think about our personas’ usage and behavior. This analogy came from a product owner that we at Axis Group were interviewing during the discovery stage of a project. When we asked him to describe the different users that would use the dashboard we were designing, he offered up an analogy of seagulls vs. turtles.
Seagulls are users that come to your system with a very specific purpose. They hunt and peck at the data and leave once they have what they want. This is akin to how seagulls scavenge for food and often snatch prey both off water and off ground in a swift motion.
Turtles on the other hand like to take their time with data. These users come in with certain questions and often find themselves digging deep into the data, sometimes even on tracks tangential to the ones they started on.
What I really like about this analogy—aside from seagull and turtle sort of rhyming—is how it plays into how we already think of information displays as being explanatory or exploratory.
To sum up, the seagull vs. turtle analogy offers a good framework to reflect on the needs of your users information needs, and it could guide where on the spectrum of reporting to analytical your information display tool should lie to support users on their journey.
