Designing for Diversity: Why User Personas Should be at the Heart of Your Next Website Project

Who are the “end users” and what do they want? 

In real life, we recognize the diversity of human experience, but in too many website projects, the pressures to expedite and consolidate lead us to gloss over key differences and form a picture of users that is either too generic (e.g., “donors”) or just a straw man standing in for our own preferences and assumptions.

User personas can help you empathize with the real people using a website and understand what motivates them. They also serve to counteract a natural bias we all have in assuming that “the user” is a person essentially the same as us. 

In this session, you’ll learn about:

• Strategies for uncovering the peculiar insights about your audiences that will help you identify hidden opportunities and create more compelling web experiences.
• How to integrate user personas into your design/discovery process on the cheap (even without robust user data or site analytics).
• Our own successes and mistakes while implementing personas in website projects for a wide range of nonprofit and university clients.

Who is this session for?

• People who have never heard of user personas but want tools to better frame their design, information architecture, or content strategy work in terms of audience needs.
• People who have already tried out user personas or other audience analyses and were underwhelmed by the results.
• Anyone who needs help balancing a bunch of competing perspectives and priorities during a website redesign project.