Working Together: User Profiles
One of the first pieces of work we did with Digital Wonderlab was an online workshop to create some ‘User Profiles’. But what is a user profile and why is it important — both for website redevelopment and beyond?
In brief, user profiles (also known as a user personas) are semi-fictional characters based on key user groups. They contain detailed descriptions and characteristics about each user, such as age and needs. But there is so much more to them than this.
Janine Woodward-Grant, Deputy CEO of the Carers’ Centre and Laura Pinkstone, User Experience Designer from Digital Wonderlab have co-written this post to help explain why user profiles are so key and what can be learned from creating them:
Laura: At Digital Wonderlab, we believe that digitally mature organisations are user led. They know that if they are going to have the greatest impact to the lives of the users, they need to understand them, their world and their aspirations.
User profiles are a key part of this as they enable us to take the time to be really clear about the users we want to be delivering for. Who are they? Can we identify the different user groups and for each user group, what are their motivations, their frustrations, their goals and their habits.
User Profiles benefit stakeholders
The stakeholders you are working with are going to get a much better user experience if you understand their needs. They are going to get the information they need, in the way they need it. Some people might need quick and easy facts, whilst other users might want more in depth information and knowing which is more important to who is essential.
User Profiles benefit the organisation
As an organisation, they help you understand how to deliver your message in the way that your stakeholders want to hear it, ensuring there is a higher chance your message will be heard. It also means you are not neglecting a user group unwittingly.
User profiles are the first step of Discovery and should drive the design and user journey of any website. We would recommend that for any website or app build user experience is a top priority. It is the foundations in which you are going to craft beautiful technology so you need to invest this time at the beginning if you want to create real user impact.
Challenges & Pitfalls
Janine: One of the most challenging things we found at The Carer’s Centre was ensuring we had the right people in the room for a user profiling workshop. This can be broken down in to 3 challenges, some we tackled well, some we didn’t!
- Making it inclusive
We knew we wanted carers in the room for this session. But, particularly when doing it online, how could we ensure they felt able to engage and didn’t feel excluded from the conversation by not knowing how to use online tools? Two key approaches helped overcome this: providing multiple ways to feed in and constant check ins. Whilst some participants put their own thoughts on a shared Miro board we were all viewing, some spoke their thoughts aloud, which were transcribed in to the board by others. Each time we reached a key point, Laura from Digital Wonderlab would check in — especially with carers. “Does this seem right to you?” “Is there anything you would change?” This really enabled us to make sure there were a central part of this workshop and I know we would not have produced the rich content we have without hearing their voices front and centre.
- Finding Time
We also wanted to make sure we had staff from a variety of front line teams involved to get a rounded perspective of our users. But these teams are really busy delivering their day to day services! With a small staff team it was hard, or rather impossible, to find times that someone from each team could make within the timeframe we had. If we’d planned further in advance, and got dates in diaries with 6–8 weeks’ notice, we may have had more luck. But we wanted to move much faster than this would allow.
- Communicating effectively
Finally, we didn’t communicate well enough the importance of the workshop to the rest of the organisation. Probably because we hadn’t fully realised this ourselves until we’d seen the results! Added to that, we’d assumed everyone else in the organisation were as excited about the new website as us, so of course everyone would fall over themselves to join a workshop, right? In a small team, many of whom work part time, and with demanding workloads, that’s just not possible — especially when it’s not clear what the outcomes of the workshop will be and how this might help them in other ways. If there were one thing I would do differently, it would be this. Making sure everyone on the staff team understands the value of these early workshops, especially user profiling.
Nevertheless, thanks to fantastic input from our carers, after a two hour workshop and a lot of work from Laura bringing our scribbles to life, we had a great first draft of user profiles ready to go!
Laura: Here at Digital Wonderlab, we have seen that internal stakeholder buy-in can be hard when everyone is working hard and has competing commitments. Janine is not alone, creating a compelling vision of the whole project and the impact it will have to the rest of the organisation is really important. Consider an internal launch before you even begin the project. Creating a buzz and excitement before we start these projects is a great way to gain stakeholder buy in. Sometimes we feel we have to wait until we have something to share but the earlier you can start bringing the wider team on board the better. Remember people in your organisation really care about the work you do and want to make a difference to the lives of carers. When we position the impact that user profiles will make to the overall project outcome because it ensures we have the user at the centre of everything we do, people will be more likely to engage.
User Profile Top Tips
Janine: The Carers’ Centre are by no means experts in this field, but in conversation with Digital Wonderlab, we’ve come up with 3 top tips from our experience:
- Test user profiles out with people who didn’t create them, to sense check them. The first people we showed our drafts to were a group of carers. Though we’d had some carers in the room whilst designing the profiles, did other carers agree with what we’d come up with? Their feedback was really valuable, highlighting the areas of the profile which were the most important and noting the typos / errors that had crept in. It might seem silly, but it’s really important to correct these to ensure this isn’t what people focus on when they see it for the first time!
- Make user profiles live documents that you add to. Over the course of our website Discovery phase, we met with lots of stakeholders. Each time we did, we added this knowledge to the profiles. It wasn’t that the first drafts were wrong, but the latest versions are better! For example, as our carer conversations went on it became clear we actually needed two different carer profiles. One for those visiting the site for the first time, and one for those who were already registered with us, as they are groups with different needs from the site. It’s important not to bloat user profiles, making them too difficult to digest, but having the ability to adjust them is something we found really vital.
- It can sometimes be uncomfortable defining a whole group under one profile, especially when we embrace diversity and inclusion and don’t want to fall into stereotypes, but this activity is about finding the uniting commonality that defines that user group. What it is like to walk in their shoes. It does not mean there will be people who won’t fit the profile and it might not be perfect, but a really well-researched profile will create real impact. So the more people you have in the room, the more diverse the people within each user group, the more impact you will have
Moving forward
This whole process has certainly taught us that creating and using the 8 profiles we have for the website is just the first step. These documents are so helpful to make sure that users stay at the heart of service design, delivery and development that we hope they will become valuable assets across the charity. Our ambition is to see them constantly being evolved as we learn more about our users, and for us to develop new profiles for specific audiences as we grow and change. Here in the digital team they’ll certainly remain a mainstay for us, and we’re excited to look at ways we can support the wider team in their use too!
If you’d like copies of our profiles, or to talk in more detail about our approach to discovery, feel free to get in touch — we’re always happy to share learning over coffee, real life of virtual!
