Lorelei Brown and Hallie Wilfert
Abstract
Design meetings should be about having productive discussions about what our users want, and how we can match the business goals to the users’ needs. Unfortunately, without access to real users, these meetings can be bogged down in details like which business unit is more important, what the CEOs favorite color is, or which corporate brand is hottest.
Too often IAs are brought into projects where they have little or no access to actual users and expected to justify their decisions with real data to elevate themselves out of the “I think”/ “you think” discussion. However, with a little elbow grease and some creativity, you can discover quite a lot about your users without ever talking to them directly!
Most organizations have artifacts on hand that help tell the story of the audiences, but you’ll need to get out your magnifying glass, pith helmet, and your tiny little broom, because we’re going digging for data! We can conduct user research by proxy with information on web traffic, user behavior, and user opinions with free or low-cost tools. Plus, there is also a huge set of Internet usage and user research available to tap into to augment what you can gather.
But it doesn’t just stop there! Learn how to present and justify your data so that you can use your research convincingly in a meeting to support your design choices.
Specifically, this workshop will have three parts:
1. Data gathering & analysis
Without real data, it’s easy to poke holes into your design decisions, and return to the mindset of my opinion vs. your opinion. It’s much harder to argue with what users report, what they prefer, and how they behave. There are sources of information for every size and scale of project including traffic, search analysis, publicly available demographics and research, and social media.
2. Constructing your argument
No one wants to wade through all that data you just gathered – you need to tell them a story about it. This part of the workshop will focus on how to present your data, whether that is with personas or other task-centered deliverables.
3. The Meeting From Hell Bootcamp
The last part of this workshop focuses on how to get your research taken seriously.
Sample schedule:
8:30-9:45 - Site and search analytics and how to mine social media to find out what people are saying about you
- What they tell you
- Looking at sample data
- Group exercise interpreting sample data
- How to use this in deliverables and presentation
9:45-10:00 - Break
10:00-10:30 - Outside research
- What’s available
- How offline behaviors inform online behaviors
- Group exercise presenting design justification using offline data
- How to use this in deliverables and presentation
10:30 - 11:00 - Setting metrics
- *How do offline metrics effect online business
- Which metrics are right for your business
- Group exercise – match the business with the metrics
- How to include metrics in your persona
11:00 - 11:15 - Break
11:15 - 12:30 – Final exercise and presentations
Speaker Details
Lorelei Brown is a content strategist right now, but has been an information architect, problem ninja, user experience professional and information ecologist. Over the last 13 years, she’s worked with all kinds of companies to understand how to match their business needs to user desires. Her specialty is doing IA on a tight budget. She has spoken at the IA Summit, USDA Graduate School, refresh dc, and UPA-DC. Her current favorite tools are the persona, sparklines, and microcontent.
Hallie Wilfert is a Senior Information Architect at SRA International, Inc. with over 8 years of experience in information architecture, user research, web communications, and content strategy. She uses web analytics extensively in informing user research has established processes for integrating analytics into user-centered design. She presented on using analytics to improve user experience at the 2008 Information Architecture Summit, the 2008 Usability Professionals Association International Conference, and at the USDA Graduate School’s class on Information Architecture.