Personas are more useful than you think

By using a persona to answer these questions, product design teams can actually be in the user's shoes, and can better meet a real user's needs and wants. Personas are not what people tell you about themselves; they are observations and descriptions of why (motivation) a person does what he/she does.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may also be used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), having been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.
 
A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design. See more

Persona’s are widely used in UX studies for the last decade at least, of UX research includes this method in its projects. 

Here are a few ideas I have selected about a persona and how they make sense to use. Here are five ideas to help you consider personas differently.

1.      Real or Real Enough-It’s easy to interchange the words “user” and “persona” for someone that does not know how personas are developed and how users are defined in a given project. I believe understanding the difference the two can lead to a wealth of information and understanding of your client and their customers. Personas are (usually) well structured factious profiles of an ideal customer (good/bad). They function as representations that help guide strategic decisions and the design of an application how someone will use it.

2.      Love me, Love me not- Personas are not all about your customers likes and dislikes in regards to things that don’t fall within the parameters of project. Things like employees of the company, location of the headquarters and so on are just not relevant at all. Personas search out and find motivations, expectations, and so on. A good persona is a story that gives us a glimpse into the skills, perspective, background and goals of your (the clients) ideal client in pre-determined situation. In short, personas bring a user to life. 

 

3.      You’re doing too much- Personas save ux teams plenty of time and money, if done correctly it is a valuable time saving tool. The downfall to this method is spending too much time creating them. Do not allow yourself or your team to spend too much time creating a persona. All you want to concentrate on in this process is skills, attitudes, motivations, environment and goals. 

4.      What makes the clock tick-  Listening to your customer is useful and great for business but knowing what your customer thinks is kinda misleading in the case of personas when used in focus groups. You really want to avoid asking for opinions and focus your time on uncovering motivations. Personas allow you to understand, identify and communicate what the user needs efficiently and effectively. Personas, along with usability testing, identify specific opportunities to improve, innovate on, and bridge the gaps to make sure you are delivering a fully functional and usable product with the most value to the user.

5.      You’re user wants benefit not just another answer Personas give a name, face and story to the user that your designing for, they give a voice to this person. If you don’t know who your designing for you can’t actually design your project efficiently enough to expect success. Personas give your target a seat at the table. 

Persona's are able to provide details to important questions that a "user" cannot define.

• Which information is necessary at which point of the day?
• Is the user concentrating on only one thing at a time?
• Does the user have frequent interruptions during their experience?
• Why is he/she using the product?
• What motivates him/her to use this specific product over a competitor's?

I only do it my way, sorta! Principles of Design you should know.

by Charious McLaurin 

Steve Jobs once said, "In most people's vocabularies, design is a veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product."

Designers are expected to imagine new things, not to study what exists today. In ordinary life, people are inventive but within the bounds of everyday life. To get people into a more creative mood, constructive design researchers use several techniques that differentiate them from the social sciences. One technique is vocabulary, which often fails at crucial moments. Few people have an extensive vocabulary for describing things such as materials, colors, shapes, spaces, and other things of immediate interest to designers. Designers have to find ways to make people imagine.

To understand the principles of good design, you have to consider all the layers that create great design. This careful marriage of all the "layers" of design are what make a design beautiful, timeless, and, ultimately, successful in reaching its goals.

For the purpose of this article I will cover the first layer which is purpose. The intentions of a design work together with the limitations of the technology used to create the design, as well as with harmonies of form, geometry, and color. All these pieces, all these layers, are inextricably linked with one another, forming the whole of what truly is design.

Whoa, that was deep right? Okay consider this for a second, design includes distinct layering an interconnectedness of different factors, that manifests itself in the impact of seeing a new living structure, sound or arrangement of shapes to create something you’ve never seen until now but at the same time its presence on its medium comforts you.

It's important to understand the layers that make up a design, because getting those layers to work together is the key to creating designs that look good, that solve problems, and that ultimately influence your users. On the web, more than anywhere else, using the layers of design appropriately is critical to success. People are exposed to more information today than ever before, and there just isn't enough time or attention for us to process all of it. So, we use shortcuts to decide what is deserving of our ever-more-precious attention.

Purpose of Design

Every piece of design has a purpose or an intention. The Pantheon was built as a temple of the gods, the iPod was built as a portable device for playing music, and every website or application you create has its own set of purposes. This article was written to help you widen your perspective on design in general. The purposes and intentions of a design is to interact with the characteristics and needs of a user. Every user needs to be able to access information clearly, and this communication is the very foundation of design. The ultimate achievement of any design in my opinon is to empower the user with one look. Meaning, when they see it (whatever it may be) they already know how it can benefit them even if they have never seen anything like it before.

Visual Design  

Within the context of designing websites or applications, visual design is a component of the discipline of user experience design. User experience design concerns itself with anything relating to a user's interaction with a product. User experience design attempts to make products memorable and easy to use and incorporates a number of different disciplines, including usability.

Visual design is intertwined with the other disciplines of user experience design. Because successful design relies upon sensitivity to the interconnectedness of these disciplines, it's important to have an understanding of user experience design when working on a project. The structured thinking of the user experience design process ensures that you're meeting the needs of your user and produces the basic shape of your application, which strongly influences your visual design.

The image below is a view of visual design's relationship with other disciplines within user experience design (in the context of websites and applications). As you can see, visual design is intertwined with the content and usability of a product. Naturally, the content of a product is what a visual designer is really trying to illuminate, while usability considerations — which strongly influence visual design — ensure that the end-user will be able to use the product effectively. Visual design is a component of user experience design and is influenced by other disciplines and components of user experience design.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when integrating user experience with your visual design:

·      You don't always need a great visual design to be successful. Be sensitive to the needs of your users, how they interact with your product, and how your product fits into the competitive landscape.

·      Great visual design depends upon great user experience design. Use some form of a user experience design process early on in your project. User personas use cases, and wireframes all help you focus on the critical aspects of user experience before getting caught up in details.

Any book on design has to face a difficulty that stems from the English language. The word "design" is ambiguous, as it covers both planning (of products and systems), and also what most other European languages would loosely call "form giving." The latter meaning is more restrictive than the former, which may cover anything from hair and food design to designing airplanes.

People negotiate their way through their life halfway with their eyes, ears, hands, and body, as well as their sense of space and movement and many kinds of things they are barely aware of. Although everyone lives in this halfway every second, there are few words to describe it. However, it is the stuff of design education. In Sharon Poggenpohl's words, “it aims at developing sensibilities of visual, material, cultural, and historical contexts.”

Designers trained in the arts are capable of capturing fleeting moments and structures that others find ephemeral, imaginative, and unstable for serious research. They are also trained in reframing ideas rather than solving known problems. Above all, they are trained to imagine problems and opportunities to see whether something is necessary or not. It is just this imaginative step that is presented in discussions on innovation in industry.

Your design can be indispensable tools for transforming designers’ intuitions, hunches, and small discoveries into something that stays — for instance, a prototype, product, or system. They provide the means for sketching, analyzing, and clarifying ideas as well as for mediating ideas and persuading others. In Bruno Latour's philosophical language, design things turn weak hunches into stronger claims. They also translate many types of interests into joined strongholds and provide tools that take design from short to long networks. This ability to gather people to talk and debate without any command of special skills is what is needed to work with systems design methods. Flow diagrams and other rationalistic tools cut too many parties out from design, creating a caste system. Understanding these forms requires training, and the mere use of these tools tells non-experts to stay away.

Like Steve Jobs said, many people think of design as some kind of afterthought — the upholstery on a couch, the logo on a business card, or the visual look of a button on a website. In pursuit of understanding design, many are led down the fruitless path of approaching design with this definition in mind. They may try to learn how to create a particular visual effect, repeatedly refer to lists of do's and don'ts, or try adding visual elements to a design that do little but create clutter.

In psychology, there are shortcuts called heuristics. Heuristics help us solve complex problems and make complex decisions by using "rules" that are either programmed into us by evolution or learned from our own experiences. These heuristics are in heavy use as people make decisions on the web. We make split-second judgments about how much we trust a news site to give us accurate information, how much we trust an e-commerce site to process our payments securely, or whether we believe a nonprofit will use our money wisely.

It turns out, in all these cases, design is the single most important heuristic we process when deciding whether a site, product or service is credible. The factors that influence design are countless, with fuzzy boundaries. You could ask a dozen different design experts what factors manifest themselves in a piece of design, and although you'd get a dozen different sets of answers, they would all pretty much cover the same things.

Usability on a dime: 10 reasons you can implement a usability test on decent budget

ACCESSIBILITY

Anything that enables visitors to access the information on the website.

• Design : Design is used to improve the UI of web page not to decorate it. Keep your website design as simple as possible as in term of Usability, “Less is Always More” so a website should be simply beautiful & functional
• Faster : Faster a visitor can browse, happier he will be. Its must to keep the processing fast so that users will quickly get what they want and keep coming back to your website. So better to design simple so that visitors are not supposed to wait as wait can make them leave your website
• ·Relevant Media : Relevant media such as Photos, Videos, Animations, Graphics can engage a visitor and helps in keeping them on the website for the long time as Rich media can increase readability. But not to use graphics that can hide your navigation menu or important information as this can frustrate the visitor.
• ·Search Bar & Site Map : The most important usability tools that you can offer to your website visitor.
• ·Size Matters: The bigger the site, the more essential the search bar; for better UI stick to the traditional design of Search Bar and keep it at the top, right of the page.
• ·A Site Map is a web page that lists the pages of a web site, organized in hierarchical order; it improves both web page navigation and search engine optimization.

NAVIGATION

A clear path to the visitor for the information they need.

• • Simple : Users are very impatient so better to make your navigation system obvious and traditional so that they can easily navigate through it and can simply reach to the information they need. For better UI, keep your navigation menu small and above the fold (i.e. the area of the page that is visible on the screen without scrolling down).
• • Cookie crumbs : Homepage is not the only entry page of your website so make it clear to users which page they’ve landed on by using Cookie crumbs as it helps visitor to know that what page of the website they are on.

CONTENT

• Design of web page should be such that it ease visitors to read the content.
• Strategically Creating Content : The first two paragraphs of your content must contain all the important information as users won’t read whole of the content and the important information that user is looking for should be bold for better UI.
• Keywords and Titles : Don’t be a keyword stuffer as this practice can lead to the poor quality of content; focus on how the visitors would look for your information and what words they might use.

IDENTITY

• The most common question of all the visitors while visiting your website for the first time which must be replied quickly, “Who are you?”
• Logo : Be sure the company’s logo or name is clear in the header. Place logo in the top-left of all the pages of your website and make it clickable so that it can take visitor back to the home page. Logo helps in making your website’s recall value.
• Tagline : A tagline is a statement that clearly describe the website in one phrase. It can help in better understanding the motto of the website by the visitors.

The German word for "shape" or "figure" is Gestalt: An explaination of how human visual perception works

The marriage between our vision and the shapes we see…………

Early in the twentieth century, a group of German psychologists sought to explain how human visual perception works. They observed and cataloged many important visual phenomena. One of their basic findings was that human vision is holistic: Our visual system automatically imposes structure on visual input and is wired to perceive whole shapes, figures, and objects rather than disconnected edges, lines, and areas. The German word for "shape" or "figure" is Gestalt, so these theories became known as the Gestalt principles of visual perception.

Today's perceptual and cognitive psychologists regard the Gestalt theory of perception as more of a descriptive framework than an explanatory and predictive theory. Today's theories of visual perception tend to be based heavily on the neurophysiology of the eyes, optic nerve, and brain Not surprisingly, the findings of neurophysiology researchers support the observations of the Gestalt psychologists. We really are—along with other animals—"wired" to perceive our surroundings in terms of whole objects. Consequently, the Gestalt principles are still valid—if not as a fundamental explanation of visual perception, at least as a framework for describing it. They also provide a useful basis for guidelines for graphic and user interface design.

For present purposes, the most important Gestalt principles are: Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, Symmetry, Figure/Ground, and Common Fate. In the following sections, I describe each principle and provide examples from both static graphic design and user interface design.

GESTALT PRINCIPLE: PROXIMITY
The principle of Proximity is that the relative distance between objects in a display affects our perception of whether and how the objects are organized into subgroups. Objects that are near each other (relative to other objects) appear grouped, while those that are farther apart do not.
However, according to the Proximity principle, items on a display can be visually grouped simply by spacing them closer together to each other than to other controls, without group boxes or visible borders. Many graphic design experts recommend this approach in order to reduce visual clutter and code size in a user interface.

GESTALT PRINCIPLE: SIMILARITY
Another factor that affects our perception of grouping is expressed in the Gestalt principle of Similarity: Objects that look similar appear grouped, all other things being equal.

GESTALT PRINCIPLE: CONTINUITY
In addition to the two Gestalt principles concerning our tendency to organize objects into groups, several Gestalt principles describe our visual system's tendency to resolve ambiguity or fill in missing data in such a way as to perceive whole objects. The first such principle, the principle of Continuity, states that our visual perception is biased to perceive continuous forms rather than disconnected segments.


GESTALT PRINCIPLE: CLOSURE
Related to Continuity is the Gestalt principle of Closure, which states that our visual system automatically tries to close open figures so that they are perceived as whole objects rather than separate pieces. Our visual system is so strongly biased to see objects that it can even interpret a totally blank area as an object. Just showing one whole object and the edges of others "behind" it is enough to make users perceive a stack of objects, all whole. The Closure principle is often applied in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). For example, GUIs often represent collections of objects—e.g., documents or messages-as stacks

GESTALT PRINCIPLE: SYMMETRY
A third fact about our tendency to see objects is captured in the Gestalt principle of Symmetry. It states that we tend to parse complex scenes in a way that reduces the complexity. The data in our visual field usually has more than one possible interpretation, but our vision automatically organizes and interprets the data so as to simplify it and give it symmetry. In printed graphics and on computer screens, our visual system's reliance on the symmetry principle can be exploited to represent three dimensional objects on a two dimensional display.

GESTALT PRINCIPLE: FIGURE/GROUND
The next Gestalt principle that describes how our visual system structures the data it receives is Figure/Ground. This principle states that our mind separates the visual field into the figure (the foreground) and ground (the background). The foreground consists of those elements of a scene that are the object of our primary attention, and the background is everything else. The Figure/Ground principle also specifies that the visual system's parsing of scenes into figure and ground is influenced by characteristics of the scene. However, our perception of figure vs. ground is not completely determined by scene characteristics. It also depends on the viewer's focus of attention.
In user interface and Web design, the Figure/Ground principle is often used to place an impression-inducing background "behind" the primary displayed content. The background can convey information—e.g., the user's current location—or it can suggest a theme, brand, or mood for interpretation of the content.

GESTALT PRINCIPLES: COMMON FATE
The previous six Gestalt principles concerned perception of static (un-moving) figures and objects. One final Gestalt principle—Common Fate—concerns moving objects. The Common Fate principle is related to the Proximity and Similarity principles: Like them it affects whether we perceive objects as grouped. The Common Fate principle states that objects that move together are perceived as grouped or related.

GESTALT PRINCIPLES: COMBINED
Of course, in real-world visual scenes, the Gestalt principles work in concert, not in isolation. For example, a typical Mac OS desktop usually exemplifies six of the seven principles described above (excluding Common Fate): Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, Symmetry, and Figure/Ground. On a typical desktop, Common Fate is used (along with similarity) when a user selects several files or folders and drags them as a group to a new location With all these Gestalt principles operating at once, unintended visual relationships can be implied by a design. A recommended practice, after designing a display, is to view it with each of the Gestalt principles in mind—Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, Symmetry, Figure/Ground, and Common Fate—to see if the design suggests any relationships between elements that you do not intend.