Defining personas for UX evaluations

After user roles, we define personas as prototypical users of a system for UX evaluations.

jordisan April 7, 2021 IN ENGLISH, personas, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), UCDmanager, UX (User eXperience), UX manager No Comments
Defining personas for UX evaluations

(TL;DR: personas at UX manager)

A persona is a description of an imaginary person who is an archetypical user of the system, and who may be used as a reference or inspiration when designing interfaces. Therefore, once we have defined the user roles involved in our system for UX evaluations, we can create some personas to make them more real.

Since we selected usability experts and frontend developers (as occasional evaluators) as focal roles, we have defined two personas, one for each of them:

These are primary personas who would require a dedicated interface; we may define other secondary personas whose needs would be met by the same interfaces used by primary personas.

Here you have those two personas in PDF format:

Susanna [PDF]Download
Marc [PDF]Download

Or better browse them online (as they might change in the future):

From UX heuristics to an application for evaluations: user roles

Using a compilation of UX heuristics as starting point, let's take the first step to create an application for evaluations: defining user roles.

jordisan March 29, 2021 accessibility, Constantine & Lockwood, design, heuristics, IN ENGLISH, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), usability, UX (User eXperience), UX manager No Comments
From UX heuristics to an application for evaluations: user roles

(TL;DR: user roles at UX manager)

When we talk about usability heuristics, Nielsen always comes to mind; but they are not the only ones. At heuristics.uxmanager.net you have a compilation of usability heuristics, including some for specific cases like Single-Page Applications (SPA) or mobile, and even a set from a psychological point of view. All of them are also available as a spreadsheet so you can use them for your own evaluations.

Besides those heuristics, the website includes a collection of accessibility guidelines including WCAG 2.1, all of them also as spreadsheets. Although they are usually considered as different techniques, in practice both usability heuristic evaluations and accessibility evaluations are similar in essence (i.e., checking if an interface accomplishes a set of principles), and even the specialists that perform them are many times the same.

So we have a compilation of usability heuristics and accessibility guidelines, and even spreadsheets to use them for evaluations; what else can we do with them?

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