Where Would You Like to Go Today? Using Personas and Scenarios to Design a Travel Management Application

1. Where Would You Like to Go Today?Using Personas and Scenariosto Design a Travel Management Application Todd Zazelenchuk, Ph.D., UITS, Indiana University Tara Bazler, UITS, Indiana University Jim True, UITS, Indiana University

2. The next 45 minutes… • Travel@IU case study • Personas • Scenarios • The benefits • The challenges • For those about to ‘personafy’ • Questions & discussion

3. Traveling at Indiana University • 40,000 trips processed annually • 8 IU campuses • Travel authorization and reimbursement • Multiple user profiles and goals • Traditionally a paper process • Initial web-based system piloted and failed

11. Project goals • Improve the usability of the web application • Re-engineer process where necessary • Design leads development • Resources: • 1.5 FTE research & interaction designers • 1.5 FTE programmers • Timeline: • Design: May-November (50%) • Development: September-April (50%)

12. Document Analysis

13. "An absolute travesty in taking a lousy process and technology-enabling it to make it worse" Document Analysis “Never encountered a form or web interface as unfriendly, overburdening to the user, and as time consuming as TAPSWEB…. Needs some serious end-user usability studies on this system”

14. Contextual Interviews & Observations Document Analysis

16. Contextual Interviews & Observations Document Analysis Personas & Scenarios

17. Contextual Interviews & Observations Document Analysis Personas & Scenarios Member Checking & Design Critiques

19. Contextual Interviews & Observations Document Analysis Personas & Scenarios Low & High Fidelity Usability Testing Member Checking & Design Critiques

20. About personas • Made popular by Alan Cooper • The Inmates are Running the Asylum (1999) • About Face 2.0 (2003) • Hot topic in recent years • Conferences, listserv discussions • Increasing number of case studies

21. What are personas? • Fictional, representative user archetypes • Based directly on data from user research • They include names, personalities, photos, backgrounds, contexts, and goals • Seldom a one-to-one correlation between personas and job description (often multiple personas in a single job)

22. Why personas? • Difficult to design for ‘everybody’ • 50% satisfaction for all usersOR…110% satisfaction for part of the population

23. Personas for Travel@IU • Seven personas • 4 primary • Staff traveler • Faculty traveler • Travel arranger • Travel approver • 3 secondary • Student traveler • Travel department staff • Fiscal officer

24. The devil is in the details

25. Scenarios • Specific to personas • 3-4 scenarios/persona • Common + edge cases

26. The value of personas • Improved team understanding of audience’s behaviors, contexts, and goals • Synthesize and confirm user research data • They avoid the ‘elastic user’ (Freydenson, 2002) • Augments other design activities (scenarios, testing) • Helps large teams where only a few members conduct the user research

27. What are some challenges? • Not enough just to know about them – must integrate with other practices (Blomquist 2002) • How much detail is enough? • Not an exact science, only best practices – your personas will look a little different than mine • Maintaining the momentum

28. For those about to ‘personafy’ • Base personas on your user research data! • Keep persona sets small • Add life to your personas but don’t go crazy • Focus on workflow, behavior patterns, end goals • Check your interpretations with your audience • Be willing to refine and iterate as you go • Guard against reusing personas – they should be specific to the design problem

29. Informing the new design…

30. Easy access to trips and actions…

31. The old...

32. The new...

33. Integrating with Onestart portal

34. Discussion and questions? Usability Consulting Services Indiana University Presentation and additional materials available at http://www.indiana.edu/~usable