The Ergonomics Society is about to embark on a redesign of its website, and earlier this week I posted out the first deliverable from the stakeholder kickoff meeting: the user segmentation model. This deliverable, like the others, is assumptive in the sense that it has been drafted by SMEs and other proxy users, rather than through primary user research. Well, you gotta start somewhere.
Now it’s time to review the second deliverable: the profiles for each user segment. Note that I call them ‘profiles’ rather than personas: at this stage they are too elementary and skeletal (and anonymous) to really be considered anything more than notional profiles. Ideally we’d now flesh these out via a programme of focused user research, and we have available a modest budget which could be applied to support such an undertaking. I’d be interested in folks’ opinions on how to best use that for this kind of activity.
Now, let’s look at the profiles themselves. These were created during a 20 minute breakout in the stakeholder meeting, so they’re far from the finished article. Also, there was only time to cover the 5 highest priority segments, i.e.
- P1. “Information Consumers”
- P1a. Society Members
- P2. Society Customers
- P2. “3rd Party Service Consumers”
- P2 “Staff Information Consumers”
But as I said above, you gotta start somewhere. They’re included inline below as png images. Alternatively, you may wish to view them in pdf form (which I’ll upload shortly).
Coming soon will be the scenarios for each segment – for those to be meaningful, we need these profiles to authentic and believable. As before, comments on both these deliverables and the process are more than welcome.
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- Information Consumer
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- Society Member
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- Society Customer
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- 3rd Party Service Consumer
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- Staff Information Consumer
Information Interaction 
Hi Tony
Thanks for posting this. A few comments:
Society member
Pain points: constant auto-logging out from members area for some members (crashes?); lack of frequent updates of information on home page, and hard to know what has changed in the other pages. The discussion area generally – too many forums (only one needed for public?). Underutilised. Needed?
Info gatherer
Pain points: Too much information under “What is ergonomics”. Suggest this sticks more to the info under the FAQs. There was a comment on discussion a week or so ago from an HR person wanting to develop a job description or something. There were no replies. Perhaps some info on this for employers.
3rd Party Service Consumer
Pain points: Difficulty in getting a quick answer/referral for a simple question. Perhaps this would be nice to be able to do from the home page?
Keep up the good work!
Steve
The Society Member profile isn’t quite what we came up with but I think it still provides the essence of what we were describing. All in all, these look a fair representation of deliberations.
Dave
Thanks Dave
Yes I did use a little ’licence’ to expand on some details where I felt it would enhance their value / readability to those who didn’t attend the meeting, and also to make them more consistent with each other. But I tried hard not to alter the spirit of what we discussed. If you think that has been changed, then for sure let me know or suggest explicit changes – we have to get that right.
Hi Tony
Nice work. A few minor comments for discussion:
– There seems to be an implicit focus in consumption rather than collaboration. I think that a challenge will be to keep the new site updated, interesting and engaging (for all audiences) so we should explicitly focus on the content strategy. So ‘Staff Info Consumer’ may have an admin role whilst other users perhaps engage through less formal channels (more comments, fewer forums for example).
– ‘Information Consumer’ could be considered as anyone new to the society (or new to ergonomics), OR as a journalist/blogger etc who has more informed needs. I suspect that the scenarios may make this distinction clearer (“I’m Googling for ergonomics”, “I came here from Wikipedia”, Vs “I’m a schoolteacher worried about kids with heavy rucksacks”).
– I think that brand and reputation need to be reflected as positive statements throughout, e.g. Info Gatherer: “this is my one stop resource for accurate and reliable information I can trust” Society Customer: “the website is the hub of the ergonomics/HF industry; I need a presence here” etc
– Society Membership spans three generations (I’m guessing) so do we need to consider the needs and profiles of this internal user group and map it to the membership growth strategy. Without wanting to drift into lazy stereotypes about baby boomers, generation X and generation Y… Some members won’t see the value in the website, some may buy-in (if only it were useful), and some will just tweet about how irrelevant it is.
– I think that user research is absolutely critical and would advocate spending some of the budget in this area. It shouldn’t be at all expensive (especially if supported by analytics and remote unmoderated usability testing of the current site). I’ll be happy to do some in my spare time (i.e. gratis) and perhaps some UX folk working in digital agencies can contribute in return for some great PR?
Cheers
Richard
Richard
Thanks for your detailed comments – all very useful and a great insight. I’m very interested in taking you up on your offer of support in the user research – did you have a particular idea / approach in mind? I’d like to try & spec out the user research phase asap so would welcome your input on this. If it works better for you drop me an email and we can set up time to chat by phone.
Cheers,
Tony
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