Ahead of her talk at UX New Zealand 2016, Lana Gibson from Lanalytics writes about a project she worked on with Te Papa.Te Papa (a museum in Wellington, New Zealand) created audience personas based on user research, and I used these as a basis to create audience segments in Google Analytics to give us further insight into different groups. By regularly engaging with our audience using both qualitative and quantitative user insight methods, we’re starting to build up a three-dimensional picture of their needs and how Te Papa can serve them.
Personas based on user research
At Te Papa the digital team created six audience personas to inform their site redesign, based on user research:
enthusiast
tourist
social
educator
volunteer
Wellingtonian
These formed a good basis for understanding why people are using the site. For example the educator persona wants fodder for lesson plans for her class — trustworthy, subject-based resources that will excite her students. The tourist persona wants practical information — what’s on, how to plan a visit. And they want to get this information quickly and get on with their visit.We’ll follow the tourist persona through a couple more rounds of user research, to give an example of what you can find out by segmenting your audience.
Interpreting tourist needs with data
Te Papa holds information for the Tourist audience in the Visit and What’s on sections of the site. I created a segment in Google Analytics which filters the reports to show how people who visit pages within these two sections interact with the whole site. For example the keywords they search for in Google before arriving on Te Papa, what they search for when on the site, and how many of them email us.Deeper digging revealed that the Tourist audience makes up about half of our overall audience. Because the content is useful to everyone wanting to visit the museum, and not just tourists, we broadened the scope of this persona and called the segment ‘Museum visitor’.
Why segment by site category — what if the audience goes beyond these pages?
Google Analytics segments allow you to see all the pages that a particular audience visits, not just the ones you’ve filtered. For example over 2,000 people who visited a page within the Visit and What’s on sections also visited the Kids and families section in July 2016. So, the audience segment allows us to expand our concept of our audiences.You can segment by a lot of different behaviors. For example you could segment visitors by keyword, isolating people who come to the site from Google after searching for ‘parking’ and ‘opening hours’ and seeing what they do afterwards. But segmenting by site category tests the information architecture of your site, which can be very useful if you’ve got it wrong!
Visit persona wants opening hours information
What did we learn from these personas? One example is that the most searched term on the site for the Visit persona was ‘opening hours’. To help fix this, the team put the opening hours on every page of the redesigned site:
This resulted in a 90% drop in searches that include ‘hours’ (May 2016 compared with May 2015):
Developing personas with Matariki
After the re-design the team ran a project to increase the reach and engagement of the Te Papa Matariki audience. You can read more about this in "Using data to help people celebrate Matariki". Te Papa holds Matariki events in the museum, such as the Kaumātua kapa haka, and this event in particular enhanced and challenged our ideas about this audience.
The Kaumātua kapa haka is the biggest Matariki event held at Te Papa, and this year we had 4,000 unique page views to the two Kaumātua kapa haka event pages. Traffic spiked over the event weekend, particularly from Facebook and mobile devices. We assumed the traffic was from people who were planning to come to the event, as they sit in the What’s on section. But further analysis indicates that people were visiting for the live streaming of the event — we included embedded Youtube videos on these pages.The popularity of the videos suggests that we’re taking events held within the museum walls out to people on the move, or in the comfort of their own homes. Based on this insight we’re looking into live streaming more events.
We’ve taken Te Papa personas through three iterations, based on user research, analytics, then a practical application of these to the Matariki festival. Each user research method has limitations, but by regularly using qualitative and quantitative methods we’re engaging with a three dimensional view of our audience that’s constantly evolving. Each user research piece builds that view, and allows us to plan projects and site changes with greater clarity about what our users need. It means we can plan projects that will have real and measurable impact, and allow people to engage with Te Papa in useful and meaningful ways.
Want to hear more? Come to UX New Zealand!
If you'd like to hear more about how Lana and Ruth redesigned the Te Papa website, plus a bunch of other cool UX-related talks, head along to UX New Zealand 2016 hosted by Optimal Workshop. The conference runs from 12-14 October, 2016, including a day of fantastic workshops, and you can get your tickets here. Got some questions you'd like to ask Lana before the conference? You can Tweet her on @lanalytics00!
We've launched a brand new series of 'bite sized' presentations to make your lunch break more inspiring. Together with speakers, community groups, and organizations from around the world — these virtual events dive into a variety of topics impacting our industry today.
Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.
In our first Lunch n Learn, Clara Kliman- Silver, Senior UX Researcher at Google unpacked some of the barriers to effective designer-developer collaboration.
In her talk "UX in a distributed world", Clara discussed various workflow stages, the role of design systems, common pain points, and mitigation strategies — all based on UX research studies with designers, developers, and product teams over the last three years.
Clara also covered research on UX tools, how tools have transformed workflows, and where a perceived tooling problem might actually be a process issue (and what you can do about it). In addition, she considered how tools and workflows might evolve in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sYWOdROBM
📹: UX in a distributed world.
Speaker bio
Clara Kliman-Silver is a Senior UX Researcher at Google who studies design teams, design systems, UX tools, and designer-developer collaboration.
She specializes in participatory design and generative methods to investigate workflows, understand designer-developer experiences, and imagine ways to create UIs.
In previous roles, she has conducted research on developer tools, artificial intelligence, and healthcare. Clara holds a Bachelors of Science in Cognitive Science from Brown University.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues, and we hope to see you at the next Lunch n' Learn.
Making a difference through UX was a shared passion among an impressive line-up of 7 researchers, strategists, and designers from the global UX community at this year’s 100% virtual 3-day UX New Zealand conference.
1. From bombs to bots: the evolving landscape of frontline research
These days Darya Pilram, Senior Researcher at Twitter, spends her days trying to understand the motivation and techniques of groups who ‘hire’ technology to spread harmful narratives. The desert of Mogadishu and the urban conflicts of South Africa are just some of the unlikely places she’s leveraged the power of frontline research to create change.
"I realized the only way to influence change was by bringing folks along with me - and so I did. I bought them right into the field with me."
2. Beautifully accessible: why embracing inclusive design shouldn’t hold back your creativity
Experience Designer Beth McPhail refuses to buy into the mindset that ‘accessibility is a creativity killer’. She challenges her peers to view accessibility as an opportunity to grow creatively while making technology more inclusive.
“Accessibility is making it possible for someone to attend the party…and lose themselves in the music.”
3. Innovating within the Justice sector | Part 2: For a fairer start - design’s role in shaping mana enhancing social & systemic change.
Kelsey Gee is back challenging designers across all levels to think differently about how design can be used across different mediums and constraints to generate meaningful experiences and meaningful change. In this session, she explores design’s role in creating empowering experiences that break both cycles of crime and institutional racism. (If you missed Part 1 from Mini Con head over here)
"I truly believe that our superpower lies in our ability to redesign society, especially for our whanau and our most vulnerable communities…and once again explore design’s role in creating equal opportunities across safe, seamless, and healing public services."
4. First do no harm: make your designs more trauma-informed and survivor sensitive
In 1985, a researcher botched an interview question which led to a new understanding of trauma and its long-term effects. It grew awareness of the need to be trauma-informed in your work but what’s it actually mean? UX Researcher Melissa Eggleston explores what it means to be trauma-informed and shares practical advice on how to achieve it.
"Trauma is everywhere and something for us to think about…regardless of whether we’re working with people we know are dealing with traumatic events…it’s really all over the place."
5. Changing the way we design high-risk products to make meaningful impact
One in five people experiences “mental illness or significant mental distress” in New Zealand. It’s a problem the Government knows needs to be addressed but how? In her powerful presentation, Rachael Reeves reveals what’s involved in balancing the complexities of Government with the need to rethink the way we design health products.
"Be warned you can’t please everyone and it can be tough to keep product vision aligned when you’re talking about serious consequences for people."
6. Remote research with new internet users (yes you can!)
One billion new internet users (NIU) will come online for the first time over the next 5 years. These NIU's are using their first smartphones, with most of their online activities focused on communication, maintaining social connections, and entertainment. Tiane Lee, UX Research Lead at Google outlines the challenges and considerations behind adapting research for varying levels of digital literacy, including practical ideas for planning and conducting remote research with NIU.
"NIU’s are typically less digitally literate, they may show lower confidence in digital capability, and they may perceive lower value of the internet for things like chatting and entertainment.”
7. Conditions Design: weaving the invisible threads of service design, value orchestration, and culture building
Michael Tam introduces us to the niche field of conditions design and cites a purpose built high diving board on Wellington city’s busy waterfront in New Zealand as a good example of conditions design. Find out why in this fascinating talk.
"What really impressed me here…hats off to the council because they didn’t design an experience that would discourage people from doing it. It’s designed for people to have fun (vs Hong Kong where public spaces are designed for Tai Chi not fun like this). The design allows it to happen by influencing human behavior to stay safe but encouraging fun and exploration.”
Last week Optimal Workshop was delighted to sponsor UXDX USA 2024 in New York. The User Experience event brings together Product, Design, UX, CX, and Engineering professionals and our team had an amazing time meeting with customers, industry experts, and colleagues throughout the conference. This year, we also had the privilege of sharing some of our industry expertise by running an interactive forum on “Measuring the Value of UX Research” - a topic very close to our hearts.
Our forum, hosted by Optimal Workshop CEO Alex Burke and Product Lead Ella Fielding, was focused on exploring the value of User Experience Research (UXR) from both an industry-wide perspective and within the diverse ecosystem of individual companies and teams conducting this type of research today.
The session brought together a global mix of UX professionals for a rich discussion on measuring and demonstrating the effectiveness of and the challenges facing organizations who are trying to tie UXR to tangible business value today.
The main topics for the discuss were:
Metrics that Matter: How do you measure UXR's impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and design influence?
Challenges & Strategies: What are the roadblocks to measuring UXR impact, and how can we overcome them?
Beyond ROI: UXR's value beyond just financial metrics
Some of the key takeaways from our discussions during the session were:
The current state of UX maturity and value
Many UX teams don’t measure the impact of UXR on core business metrics and there were more attendees who are not measuring the impact of their work than those that are measuring it.
Alex & Ella discussed with the attendees the current state of UX research maturity and the ability to prove value across different organizations represented in the room. Most organizations were still early in their UX research maturity with only 5% considering themselves advanced in having research culturally embedded.
Defining and proving the value of UX research
The industry doesn’t have clear alignment or understanding of what good measurement looks like. Many teams don’t know how to accurately measure UXR impact or don’t have the tools or platforms to measure it, which serve as core roadblocks for measuring UXRs’ impact.
Alex and Ella discussed challenges in defining and proving the value of UX research, with common values being getting closer to customers, innovating faster, de-risking product decisions, and saving time and money. However, the value of research is hard to quantify compared to other product metrics like lines of code or features shipped.
Measuring and advocating for UX research
When teams are measuring UXR today there is a strong bias for customer feedback, but little ability or understanding about how to measure impact on business metrics like revenue.
The most commonly used metrics for measuring UXR are quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers as opposed to internal metrics like stakeholder involvement or tieing UXR to business performance metrics (including financial performance).
Attendees felt that in organizations where research is more embedded, researchers spend significant time advocating for research and proving its value to stakeholders rather than just conducting studies. This included tactics like research repositories and pointing to past study impacts as well as ongoing battles to shape decision making processes.
One of our attendees highlighted that engaging stakeholders in the process of defining key research metrics prior to running research was a key for them in proving value internally.
Relating user research to financial impact
Alex and Ella asked the audience if anyone had examples of demonstrating financial impact of research to justify investment in the team and we got some excellent examples from the audience proving that there are tangible ways to tie research outcomes to core business metrics including:
Calculating time savings for employees from internal tools as a financial impact metric.
Measuring a reduction in calls to service desks as a way to quantify financial savings from research.
Most attendees recognise the value in embedding UXR more deeply in all levels of their organization - but feel like they’re not succeeding at this today.
Most attendees feel that UXR is not fully embedded in their orgnaization or culture, but that if it was - they would be more successful in proving its overall value.
Stakeholder buy-in and engagement with UXR, particularly from senior leadership varied enormously across organizations, and wasn’t regularly measured as an indicator of UXR value
In organizations where research was more successfully embedded, researchers had to spend significant time and effort building relationships with internal stakeholders before and after running studies. This took time and effort away from actual research, but ended up making the research more valuable to the business in the long run.
With the large range of UX maturity and the democratization of research across teams, we know there’s a lot of opportunity for our customers to improve their ability to tie their user research to tangible business outcomes and embed UX more deeply in all levels of their organizations. To help fill this gap, Optimal Workshop is currently running a large research project on Measuring the Value of UX which will be released in a few weeks.
