Creating a new set of inclusive user personas, which include accessibility types and also building a culture that embraces the usage of user personas.
Methods: Interviews (Qualitative) , Survey( Quantitative), Team and project management, Card sorting, Workshops, Training, Management, Lead designer, User journey mapping, user testing, data analysis.
Tools: Excel, Survey Monkey, Google Analtics, Figma, UXPressia, Miro (Realtime Board)
2019, 3 months
UX Designer
Due to the lack of exposure and the fast changing environment UAL's core digital personas have failed to be used by various team throughout the university and lack the core inclusive element i.e. accessibility and personality types of represent the wide range of user types.
HMW create inclusive personas and a transparent collaborative enviornment to make using personas accessible and a want for everyone to use?
Setting up the 3 sprint aims and Trello cards for the UX team to work on for the persona project.
Providing direction and assistance to the UX Researcher for creating the discussion guides for the stakeholder interviews.
Contacting and arranging meetings with the stakeholders from the following departments and teams around UAL. The interviews provided key insights on how each stakeholder and department will use the personas for their work.
Stakeholder: Accessibility and disability, Language Centre, Academic Enterprise Communications team, AEMSS (Short Courses), Finance, HR, Creative Opportunities, Mental Health Adviser, International Relations, Library Services, Accommodation, Student Admissions, Technician, Marketing and Communications, Course leaders, Research
Analysing the current user personas that exist within UAL to find key information and discover how the new personas are able to improve on the old personas.
The UX team comenced discovery during the research to see if accessibility and personality types would be a welcomed addition to personas. All the stakeholders who were interviewed agreed that both accessibility and personality types will allow them and their them to have a more diverse point of view of their users
Further plans on what types of accessibility and personality should be included and how to include them.
Created an agreement with 3 of UAL's central accessibility experts to lead and provide governance for the accessibility modular components. Also, to have colour titles for different accessibilities instead of vision etc. to not offend or group people in a negative way.
Teaming up to write a cohesive modular accessibility types, which will be used for the newly developed UAL user personas. The 4 accessibility types are Mobility, Vision, Auditory and Neurodiversity.
An analysis of arts.ac.uk yearly survey has provided insights on students behaviours, interests and more, which will be used to develop the student personas.
Due to the amount of personas and from the discovery stage of the project we were able to cut down the amount of core personas. If an unique persona type is needed then a persona template would be used for creating one.
Main personas: Students, Staff and Business, Sub-personas: Perspective students, current students, Short Course students, Teenagers, Alumni, Academic, Business, Parents.
Analysis on the interview results provide direction on how the new persona should be developed. In terms of needs and wants for each type of persona.
A joint collaboration between the UX and Content team was done to develop the copy for each of the core persona types. Plain simple English descriptions and inclusivity through the copy was key to make the personas easy to understand and use.
With positive feedback on the inclusion of modular accessibility and personality types that can create more dynamic ranges of personas.
With the basic written outline and modular stucture the UX team created paper persona prototypes to be shared with stakeholders for further feedback befoe creating finalised versions.
Performing guerrilla testing with students and staff members at verious locatons to ask and show questions related to each unique persona type of confirm that the information presented represents each persona well
With near final versions of the new user personas, the UX team used the user personas during various workshop sessions with a range of different staff members. This allowed to measure the effectiveness and improve on usage guidance for distiputing the completed user personas.
The report for the user personas project summaries the insights gained from stakeholders, guerrilla testing data analysis from various sources
The printed version of the user personas were evaluated with the Design lead from the Brand team at UAL. The review presented opportunities to bring the final printed design to Brand standard to make sure that the final product represents the University well.
It is important to keep printed versions of the personas because it's easier to utilise in meetings or workshops and for users who prefer to use printed material instead of digital.
images/ux-design/ual-user-persona-framework/4-deliver/printed-version/printed-versions-01.png
While completing the final set of personas guidance and training material was created to help staff learn how to utilise the personas and components to positively impact their projects and engagements with their key audience.
Through the UX Advocate Programme and UX Lunch and Learn Sessions created and run by the UX team. We were able to test, improve, teach and support teams with learning about personas, how to use them for their project, but most important to get everyone on the main page of who are 6 key user types are.
The time and size of the project was a bit too much for a 3 months, as large survey data, interviews and workshop insights needed to be analyised and acted on quickly. However, we were able to build awareness and create a training framework to create culture around the usage of user personas. This has proved to be much more beneficial to the overall project and the outcome from teams throughout UAL has shown that they are starting to benefit from the user persona first approach.
The UX team has plans to embed user persona training into more areas of the UX Advocate Programme to get more UAL staff members who are interested in UX to learn the key principles and practices to lead the usage of personas within their team.