Forem: Dam Digital

Are personas such a bad thing?

Jo Lunn — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 16:00:36 +0000

We all have love-hate relationships with people, places, activities and things.

I absolutely love London! The million and one cultures, arts, fashion and nightlife. That’s what makes me fall in love with this city over and over again. At the same time, I deeply hate London! The commute when I get crushed on the central line at 8 am in the morning, the two hours journey to travel from one part of the city to another and the coffees becoming smaller by the second — although I do love a good flat white!

Personas seem to be one of those subjects that receive as much love as hate from businesses and practitioners in the industry. I have worked with startups as well as international companies and I have noticed that we do not talk enough about aims and objectives of personas and sometimes businesses use them incorrectly without understanding what to do with them.

I have heard a lot of companies with a low UX maturity talk about how well they know their users. When I meet stakeholders to discuss about user experience, they always make sure to let me know that they have worked in the business for several years and this should automatically translate into how much they know about their users. I have noticed that often there’s no research to validate assumptions and there’s a lack of documentation to aggregate this knowledge. Sometimes businesses feel that is enough to just know their users but this might not be enough when you want to get every team on board.

How are we sure that we are talking about the same users if we are not talking about them and we are not documenting those notions?
When you hire someone in your team you don’t just trust candidates who say they are good at using Photoshop. You ask to see their portfolio and their CV first. If they seem to have what takes to do the job, you invite them for an interview and you try to understand more about them to see if they fit in the team and if they have the skills they need to fulfil the position. Most companies go much further than this but you get my point. Why don’t we ask the same questions about users?

Let’s ask who users are, what their goals are and why they make certain decisions. Why are we scared of asking these questions?

Andy Budd — founder of the digital agency Clearleft — describes personas as a communication tool and “[…] as a way of synthesising a large amount of rich and complex data, generated through observations, interviews and surveys, into something that can travel around an organisation, and be consumed by people who weren’t necessarily involved in the conversation, or even have regulated access to customers.”

I have found personas to be an important tool to align stakeholder’s knowledge of users. When we worked on the redesign of the Rethink Mental Illness website, we created primary and secondary personas to summarise the data collected from analytics, survey and user interviews. They became essential when talking to stakeholders to clearly align everyone’s thinking. Everyone knew ‘Jane who experiences depression’ or ‘Beth who is a carer for her son’ as well as the other personas we created. The use of personas has also been valuable within the agency to communicate effectively to other members of the team like visual designers and developers.

Personas work because stakeholders find them simple to relate to, they are easy to remember and to share across multiple teams. You don’t need any specialist knowledge.
As stated by the NN/Group “a persona stands for a group of users with similar behavioural patterns, goals, motivations, and expectations; personas keep product-design decisions focused on user needs” and this is the reason why I find them to be a powerful tool to talk about the users.

When I ran stakeholder workshops for Rethink Mental Illness, I printed out the personas on A3 sheets and put them on the wall for everyone in the room to have a point of reference. It was great to see stakeholders to look around the room and refer to a specific persona’s needs to validate their point of view.

I am not saying that personas are a must-have in every design process, but I would definitely recommend them, especially when clients do not adopt a user-centred approach. If personas are not the right way to engage stakeholders that’s fine. You can always try other tools that can help you and the business to empathise with your users.

Last month, I attended the ‘Design for Leadership’ event in London, organised by Tech Circus. It was interesting to hear from the panel about the importance of having a flexible approach as a leader as well as in the processes that we use. I have found that there isn’t a one size fits all solution for research and design. Especially when you work in an agency and you are dealing with a lot of different clients, you need to be ready to tweak your process, listen to the business needs and find the best way to understand users.

So, in my experience personas are a great communication tool and they help me to drive a user-centred approach. Personas work best when clients are involved in their creation. When it’s clear what personas are being used for the project, everyone in the business, as well as designers and developers, can use them as a reference.

Im 17 working as a software development apprentice, Ask Me Anything!

Jack Fagan — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 13:11:19 +0000

Hi!
Im 17 years old and 7 months into my software development apprenticeship in london primarily doing web development. Ive learnt both front end and back end development and want to answer your questions to spread how an apprentice can benefit your company and for people my age show that it could be a better route than UNI :) thanks

AMA

Visual Studio 2017 Extensions

Richard Ballard — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 13:30:17 +0000

This article originally appeared on Richard Ballard's blog

As part of my push to 'work smarter, not harder', here is my list of Visual Studio 2017 extensions in no particular order.

I will endeavour to keep this list up to date as and when I start using new extensions.

Web Essentials 2017

Mads Kristensen is the Visual Studio extension guy and many of his great extensions can be found packaged up in Web Essentials 2017, which is aimed at Web Developers specifically. Do read the notes for information on each of the extensions included but some of my my personal highlights are included below. Although this extension pack will install all the listed extensions, you can simply remove any of those you don't require after. Alternatively you can install the extensions individually.

Add New File
This is without doubt the best extension for Visual Studio. Simply hit Shift + F2 for a dialog where you enter the name for you new file along with the correct file extension. You can even add new folders from the same dialog by adding a '/'. So much easier to use than VS's built in method for adding new files.

Open Command Line
This is an invaluable addition to your Visual Studio workflow. Want to jump directly to the command line at the correct path for the file you're working on? Just hit Alt + Space and this extension will do just that.

Image Optimizer
The Image Optimizer allows for lossless image compression, reducing the page weight for your website with no compromise in quality. A right click on a image folder directly in VS will allow you to optimise all images including those in sub folders. Another handy feature is that to copy an image as base64, no need to leave VS at all.

Web Compiler
Need to compile SASS/LESS among others? Install the Web Compiler extension and after some simple configuration have these files compiled in no time. Compile files on file save, project build or trigger manually if needed. Our team are moving away from this in favour of other compilers but to get things moving quickly it's still a great option.

File Icons
Who doesn't want everything to look a little more beautiful and File Icons does just that. Where Visual Studio drops the ball with missing icons for certain file extensions, File Icons steps in to brighten up that solution explorer.

Learn the Shortcut
This is a great way to try and learn the shortcuts for some repetitive tasks in Visual Studio. Next time you feel your hand leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse, have a look at the output and see to you if there is a shortcut you can incorporate into your workflow for those productivity gains!

Error Catcher II
Shows the errors, warnings and messages relevant to the file your working on in the top right hand corner. This is a small UI change that can really help a lot.

Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
Makes trailing whitespace loud and abrasive so you know it's there and reminds you to tidy up. There is also an option to remove this trailing whitespace automatically on file save. Perfect.

Disable Solution Explorer's Dynamic Nodes
An extension that removes some of the noise in the solution explorer by removing the Dynamic Nodes (those orange child nodes things..) that are shown when expanding a collapsed .cs file. I never use them so it's nice to be able to remove them completely.

Visual Studio Spell Checker

I can't recommend this extension highly enough, it's saved mine and the team's bacon many times. No longer is it the norm to publish webpages with copy typos. Once you see those big swirly underlines they're hard to ignore. The extension only checks plain text, strings and comments so your code is safely ignored. It will take a small amount of time at first to tell it to add some common words to it's dictionary but it's certainly worth investing that time.

GitHub Extension for Visual Studio

Makes cloning repositories within Visual Studio that bit easier by showing you the available repositories accessible from your account. Saves you having to go find the url in GitHub to then perform the clone from the command line or having to leave VS to switch to another Git client to do the same task.

Code Maid

I used to use this extension a lot more in previous years than I do now but I still have it installed. This is a feature rich extension that's worth looking into. However I only use it for it's code clean up feature now which I still prefer over Resharper's. Trigger this on a file with the shortcut Ctrl + M + Space. I'm sure there are other options out there now but it's ingrained in my workflow now.

To blog or not to blog

Richard Ballard — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 11:33:13 +0000

This article originally appeared on Richard Ballard's blog

I've always appreciated the effort others have made to maintain their blogs, happily consuming them for my benefit. However, I'd always thought that blogging was for others and not for me.

Recently I decided to change that.

So I bought a domain, did my platform research and set up this site. I wanted my first foray into blogging to document the whys and wherefores that led me to writing this post. Here are my reasons...

Reasons not to blog

Time

How often do we say the following sentence in our day to day lives?

I don't have the time.

We constantly think of ourselves and our lives as being super busy, and often they can be, however there is always time if we chose to find it. As Laura Vanderkam says in her brilliant TED Talk, when we say "I don't have time" what we're really saying is "That is not a priority for me".

So if we know that we can find the time by making blogging a priority, we remove one of the main psychological barriers.

Fear of failure

This one is a big one for me. If I decide to do something then I want to do it well and I certainly don't like to fail. Or maybe a more accurate statement is, I don't like to fail publicly.

The thing is though, in the context of a blog, what is failing?

No one reads it

Who cares? I'm happy writing this blog purely for myself and the cathartic experience of documenting my thoughts and experiences - if no one actually reads it then I'm completely okay with that.

A lack of posts

We've all seen blogs that have had no posts for 3 years, or super sporadic posts. Again, who cares? That person felt they had something to share and they made the effort to do so. I think that is something to be proud of and certainly not something that should cause guilt.

I personally will aim to write a couple of posts a month, but equally if I don't feel I have anything worth posting then I won't write for the sake of it.

Inferiority complex

Why would someone listen to me when there are already great minds out there sharing their experiences?

There are many reasons why this shouldn't be a problem, yet that nagging doubt does exist. The main reason I've overcome this one (I hope) is because I realised that, quite simply, everyone's experiences are different. Similar yes, but different. The way I learn a new language or concept will differ ever so slightly to that of another another developer. The projects I've worked on and the people with whom I've interacted all differ as well, meaning no two experiences are completely equal.

Another reason is that the likes of Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood one day sat down at a computer and wrote their first ever blog post. They started writing posts and socially contributing to the industry and, luckily, they haven't stopped since. You've got to start somewhere and I don't need to feel inferior due to others' successes.

Reasons to blog

Documentation

Documentation. Documentation. Documentation. The word a lot of developers hate to hear when uttered by their Manager. Yes it can mean tedious work that takes us away from doing what we enjoy the most, but we all know how important it is. When we're searching the web for a solution to that troublesome, non descript error; we're hoping, praying that some kind soul has already found and shared the solution. If I can in any way aid the community, and indeed my future self, by taking the time to document a problem I overcame then, well, that's great.

Communication skills

So communication is hard. Whether it is trying to articulate a problem in code to a fellow developer, status reports to Project Managers or writing emails to clients... It's hard. Your intention can easily be lost in a sea of words when what you're desperately trying to do is communicate in a simple, concise and effective manner.

The best way to improve your communicate skills, as with everything, is to practise. I plan out my status reports, set agendas for one-to-ones and re-write emails to clients in an attempt to try and communicate effectively. It's difficult to put down words that express your meaning and it's something I would love to be better at. It's my intention to use this blog as a means to practise and further improve my written communication.

Social

Throughout my career so far I've not had a presence on the Internet. If you google my name nothing comes up and I've always been weirdly happy with that. No Tweets, no Facebook, no blog posts, no Stack Overflow activity, no Open Source contributions and until very recently, no LinkedIn profile (a change only recruiters seem to have enjoyed!). I have however, been a consumer. A glutinous consumer who hasn't given anything back.

It's now time to change that. If I can help out one person by putting some content out there, then fantastic, and if I don't then I'm happy to have at least contributed to the community. The intention is there.

I'd love to think that in the near future I'd be contributing on Stack Overflow, GitHub, this blog, meet-ups... but I'm a realist and, well, baby steps first eh.

Clarity of opinion

I recently read Ben Roux's post, Untold Benefits of a Software Blog, and it only really hit home when I started to write this post. I found that, yes I had broad points that I wanted to discuss, but not all of these had been fully explored or fleshed out. It took the process of me sitting down to write this post for me to realise how incomplete our opinions can be and I definitely think it's worth taking the time to explore these further and fill in the blanks. I'm keen to use this blog as a conduit in which to explore these incomplete areas of my thoughts and opinions.

Drive and motivation

I like to think I'm a determined person. I want to be the best I can possibly be, but I also know I'm inherently lazy. I need discipline and external motivation to keep me moving forward. An office, a team around me and a deadline are great ways of keeping motivated daily. I want this blog to also be another motivational facet.

I don't want to write about the same few experiences over and over just with different words, I want to be able to write about new and exciting topics. It's very easy to become complacent and I intend to use this blog as a means to guard against this complacency by seeking out new experiences to share.

Why I finally bit the bullet

So why am I finally taking the plunge and sharing my words? That's a good question and one I'm not able to answer fully, but I think it's mainly about maturing. I feel I'm now able to contribute something to the community, whereas a few years ago I probably didn't have the confidence.

I also think an awareness of how best to spend my time has made an impact. I've mentored a good number of developers in my career from both a technical and non-technical approach, and I've found myself having some of the same conversations with all of them. I'd never want to lose the personal touch of a one-to-one conversation, but if I'm able to share a post I've written that details an approach or opinion then that could save us both valuable time.

The final reason I decided to buy a domain, spin up a Ghost instance on Azure and start typing is due to a close friend of mine. I was sat in the pub with him a while back and I mentioned that I'd been thinking about blogging, his reaction surprised me. He was dismissive and negative about the idea. I'm paraphrasing but basically he didn't see the point; for a lot of the same reasons I listed above. That didn't sit overly well with me. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't trying to be a dick on purpose, he just didn't see the positives that I saw and I guess it took that debate for me to commit to starting this blog.

Here's to carrying it on.