Using personas to guide your intranet redesign

Welcome to Melcrum's new Social Media and Intranets Newsletter.

At the Member-exclusive lunch briefing to be held in Sydney on 29 January 2009, Jane Floyd will discuss the persona work she's done at Railcorp. It will no doubt be a great session, with Anthia Galanis from Telstra, and Kate Needham from the Department of Primary Industries also demonstrating their respective organization's intranet.

What are personas?
If you've not heard or read much about personas, you might think, "What are they, and how can they be of use for intranet reviews?"

As usability expert Tina Calabria wrote in an article for Step Two Designs in 2004:

"Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics.

They identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behavior, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo (although the actual names and photos used are fictitious)."

A complementary tool
Using personas in conjunction with other research tools including needs analysis interviews, means you can build up a great picture of your different user groups and focus with laser-like accuracy. You can then base the redesign of the intranet around the information, systems, data and transactions those groups work with on a daily basis. Calabria says benefits of personas can also include:

• easier prioritization of design elements according to personas; and
• helping to avoid the trap of building what users ask for instead of what they will actually use.

Personas in use
If you're designing a site for other users then you might want to consider using personas. In one project that my colleague Rebecca Rogers has worked on recently, personas were used to identify different types of users for an academic institution's website. Students and lecturers with varying levels of experience were identified as different user groups.

In a project I worked on, while not using fully developed personas, we focused on a particular demographic and type of worker that made up 50 percent of the organization's employees and who were deemed to benefit the most from various elements of the intranet overhaul. Their potential gains are set to have a positive, knock-on effect throughout the organization.

Find out more
There's a great deal more to personas, with their use and popularity increasing all the time in intranet and website design projects. If you're in Sydney in January, register for the Member-exclusive lunch briefing on the 29th and hear all about Railcorp's work on them.

If you're not in the region, watch out for a post-event review and don't forget you can read Calabria's article in full on the Step Two Designs' website.

Until next time,

Alex Manchester
Senior Consultant
Step Two Designs
alex@steptwo.com.au

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