Why Personas are Important

Sometimes when you're doing a project, and the client wants the UX done yesterday, it's tempting to skip doing your homework: personas, user stories, task flows and everything else that we know we're supposed to do as designers.

However on this project I was really really glad we did our homework because the results of the persona's completely changed the way we did the structure of the site.

There are three types of users of the site. The first and most important user is a young, tech-savvy demographic who would almost certainly be doing everything on their cell phone. They're busy busy busy.  They only have a few minutes before they get bored or abandon the site completely.

The second type of user is an administrator. They would never be looking at the site on their cell phone or probably even on an iPad.  The second user does their tasks at work on a desktop computer.  They would never ever look at the site on their mobile phone.

What a mistake it would've been to design the site in the same way for these two users!  

The client was going to use the Prototype heavily to explain the concept to investors. So we used a Justinmind mobile prototype so he could show people the site on his cell phone, at any time and from anywhere!  He could show investors how easy it was to do everything he needed to do on the phone.  We made it a design goal to have no typing whatsoever, only tapping and swiping. 

The second user's prototype was optimized for the size of a laptop and up.  Unlike the first user, who was on the mobile, we had a lot of space to work with.  We were able to take advantage of the fact that the user would most likely be using the screen size of laptop and up.  Since it was a task-heavy enterprise application it had sidebar navigation with lots of complicated actions available at their fingertips.