By way of wrap up, we decided to do what we are most passionate about, record a Podcast.  We collected a group of interesting folks we met and plopped the mic on the table and hit the record button.

Neal Sales-Griffen from @NealSales @CodeAcademy in Chicago

Giovanni DiFeterici – @giodif - from Converge SE in South Carolina

Kalani Rosell from Pubz.me

Erin Brown – @embrown - Incredible Limbist (that’s a person who is good at limbo)

Bryce Kerley – @BonzoESC - LessConf Loudmouth and convention junkie

Nathan Didier -@nathandidier - amazing wearer of sweatbands and SEO guru

Thanks to everyone who participated in the podcast. Thanks to Steve and Allan for putting this on. And we’ll see you here next year!

Speakers

The speakers were not listed beforehand.  These guys were a complete surprise to me and everyone in audience.  Is it an example of good emotional design, as in a delightful, happy surprise or a cluster fuck.  The 20 minutes of horse play and ad lib warm up gave me no confidence of the former and really pointed to the latter.

Then the first speaker:

Spike Jones – Wrote a book “Brains on Fire”

Thoughts: He reminded me a lot like Cathy Sierra, my old friend from ‘Creating passionate users’. She was on my mind, cause of the SEA of White and Male faces.  More (maybe) on that later. Money Quote: “Word of Mouth is the grand papa”

Rob Walling – Serial startup-er

Thoughts: Customer Happiness Index (CHI).  He went through his process of taking over a startup and renovating it.  Basically, he is a hardcore data guy. He focused in on Life Time Value (LTV) and cost per acquisition (CPA).  To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed to begin with but he finished really strong.  It was very practical and gave me a framework to think of the startup process.

Noah Kagan – AppSumo founder, Austin TX, former facebook guy and world champion cusser

Thoughts: Seriously, I’d never been to a convention that I heard more cussing on stage than in the audience.  My mom would’ve walked out.  It left me a bit unbalanced – sort of happy, but sort like… huh?.  [Editor's Note: You're the one who gets so happy that we have an explicit podcast. Pot, meet kettle. ] It’s like a comedy show.

Also, Noah hired a guy simply to do A/B testing – Nick (pictured shirtless, hairy, sunglasses and beer bottle). BUX aspires to be Nick.  If not in appearance, in verve and creativity.  They test all sorts of shit.  Like links to nowhere to measure support.  Crazy ass, unsubscribe sorry notes.  Other thought:  86 percent.  That’s his failure rate.  Reminds me of “Fail early and often”, “Fail forward” and “Failure is impossible”.  Good dude – probably as asshole to deal with – but a great speaker (why?  He made emotional impact and told a story)

Mental Floss Dude – (Sorry we don’t remember your name) – Sold his company and is a millionaire

Thoughts: By this time in the day, I’m starting to lose some steam. Lunch isn’t holding up like I thought it was going to. This dude started a creative magazine based on crazy specific facts – Like … crap, I can’t remember.  But they were funny.  I never remember jokes.  Einstein is on the cover of each magazine and they have diversified into games and websites and etc.  They sold to the Maxim magazine guy and will stay on to be involved.  Not sure what the takeaway was… Am I losing my focus…?  Maybe it’s the dudes still hugging in the corner of the stage during all these presentations… (more on this under Contests and Giveaways)

Bryan Liles – smartic.us

Honestly, I wrote a whole thing in this space but it wasn’t very nice. I’m not sure if I just needed some food, or if I was jealous of all the hugs going on or if this is what it feels like when you hang out with a bunch of jacked up young white dudes who are all looking for signs of people with money. Or maybe this talk really wasn’t all that.

Instead of giving you my full thoughts, I’ll give you a quick hit.

At one point, Bryan – who is a black guys said, “If you see a black man, give him a dollar.”

Now on the one hand, I’m with Bryan. This is a pretty homogenous group here. Some diversity would be nice. But that statement just sat with me wrong. But fuck it, he said it.

Now Brian, I have to say, the only thing I learned is that if you give people a dollar and ask for a picture, for some weird reason, they don’t ask questions about why you want to take it.

Boom. Wisdom. Done.

UPDATE: Here’s Newman and Bryan, who was a really good sport about the whole thing. For the record, he didn’t ask why we wanted to take the picture (but I’m pretty sure he knew).

Giveaways & Contests

The Huggers eat chilli peppers to force the winner. Allan can't take it, shows mercy, and buys the last three all iPads.

One of the things I knew about LessConf beforehand was that people got wedgies for prizes.  Public humiliation is apart of the deal.  And today lived up to the hype.

Head Shaving – Who would exchange all the hair on their head (hair and eyebrows) for an iPad.  One guy did, but they didn’t take it all before the shaver broke.  I didn’t see the guy the rest of the day.  Pretty sure he would have stuck out with one eyebrow and a few bald streaks running around his head.

The Eternal Hug-Off – Get on stage, pick a stranger and hug it up.  The one to let go last wins an iPad.  This shit lasted the whole day.  And then to end it they made them all gang-eat habanero peppers. Poor dudes.

Clothes Pin Face – Simple. Attach clothes pins to your face. The person with the most pins wins an Apple TV.

Push-ups – The person who does the most push-ups wins.  A respectable 35 wins a Kindle Touch.

Describe a date with Allan and Steve – Strange.  The winner was the girl.  Lots of bro-mance going on.  There were some references to “gravy lube”.

Destroy Your Face With Hot Peppers – Another easy one: eat hot peppers.  Last man standing wins a lifetime membership to GitHub.  Our man, Clay wins going away.  Calm and cool as a cucumber. He ate a huge habanero pepper filled with more wasabi than even the habanero was comfortable with. He didn’t even flinch.

Finale: The hugging dudes had to hug it out all day. Six hours, whoa. Then they brought out the same hot peppers. The three gang-eaters all walked away with iPads.

Hope it was worth it boys.

A big thanks to Mail Chimp and Engine Yard for hosting the after party with the open bar. Looking around on Day 2, you put a hurt on ‘em.

Today we leave Web analytics and move over to Information Architecture techniques.  Let me try to establish the relationship between the two subjects.

Web Analytics is a way to get to know your users by their behavior on the site. It’s observation. It’s passive. In web analytics, you don’t disturb the user and collect data on how they use the site.

Information architecture (IA) is the way a site is structured, but not just the site map or the navigation. IA touches on content strategy, research and design and the whole thing.  It’s about design and development. It’s active and research oriented.  This is especially true of our tools today – They are were User Testing and IA overlap.

Under the big tent of IA, we are going to focus on two types of techniques today: Card Sorting and it’s cousin, Navigation or Menu Testing.  These tools and methods allow you validate such design decisions as how content is grouped and how navigation is presented.

In the context of the critical path, this helps define user expectations of the critical path through your site.

Card Sorting Tests

I’m most interested in Card Sort – the idea just makes sense to me. You start with a list of all the content you want on your site (or the content you think should be there – or whats already there in the case of a re-design). The user is presented with this list and is asked to categorize or group the content in a way that is logical and pleasing to them.  You collect all the groupings from all the test participants and see where there is consensus and where there is disagreement.  Tweak and repeat.

For demo tests, you need look no further than twitter.  Here is a twitter search for optimalworkshop.com which gave me a bunch of test projects looking for participants.

Navigation Tests

In navigation tests, one starts with a navigation structure – say, the main menu on your website. This menu can have one level or many. You ask a test participant to complete a logical website task. It could be to find a specific product, to find a particular piece of information. The test software records where the user clicks and notes their comments. The result is that you learn how well the navigation makes sense to users. Did they complete the test accurately and quickly?  Repeated tests will help one understand how to make simple, more elegant, more meaningful menus.

These tests are so straight forward that you can do them with actual note cards and a table. It’s basically the same process: have the user either sort or navigate through them.

And while this is all fine and good, the real power is revealed when our old friends data and statistics get together and have a sit down.

Combing through 5 or 10 tests is a job and could eat up some calculator time.  But, if you do it with 50 or 100 people, that’s gonna be a problem.  ENTER our UX tools! These tools can really streamline the entire process and give you all kinds of cool reports and results – that is to say they make it easier to get actionable data and improvements to your site.

The Card Sorting and Navigation testing tools are:

Optimal Sort

This is a card sorting tool from optimal workshop.  There is a demo of how the tests look to a participant and the results. To see how to set up a test you must sign up for the free plan. The free plan is ” small (but big enough to be useful!)” – Survey 10 people with 30 cards. I wonder if this is per month or “10, just 10 and that’s it”.  Paid plans begin at $109 a month with a discount for yearly subscription.  Steep!

Some cool features include moderated card sorting or Face-to-Face card sorting tests.  Once you configure your test, you can print the cards and run the test ‘in person’.  It’s the difference between remote and moderated tests.  Also, you have access to several professional (sounding)  reports like dendrograms and similarity matrix.

TreeJack

This is a navigation testing tool from optimal workshop. There is a good demo to see the tool as a participant and the results reports. The free plan allows you to survey 10 people with 3 tasks. Plans start at $109/month.

WebSort.net

This is the card sorting tool from UXpunk.com.  First off, I like this site more than any of the others – Very quickly and clearly I know what the tool is and how it works.  Notice the sub-heading “How does WebSort work?” – that’s what I want to see on all of these tool pages.

There is a demo, a trial test, demo videos, etc.  One nice thing is that you get to see the reporting feature, which is where the UX rubber meeting the UX road.  Here’s an interesting feature and it’s somethign that Ben and I have talked about – The pricing is based on projects, not monthly service. One project is $149 for 100 test participants.

PlainFrame.com

This is the navigation testing tool from uxpunk.com. There is no demo, but there is a free plan. The free plan would allow you to create a test with, for example, 5 questions/ tasks for 5 test participants (that’s 25 responses).  I’m not sure if that’s per month or 25 responses and then you have to upgrade.  And, like the other UXpunk products, there is a single study payment structure -A single study (1000 responses) costs $99.  This would be great for the right project.

UsabiliTEST

This is a card sorting tool. There is a participant demo and a three day trial. Doing the trial, it seems is the only way to see the results reports. Bummer.  Plans start at 10 bucks a month.

Final Thoughts

There you have it.  One of these tools will surely get you started on testing your IA design decisions.  In future posts we’ll dive into these tools and do proper reviews. What about you guys? Have you used these or any other tools? Let me know in the comments.

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• Rethinking Personas for Small Business, Part 1: Signal, Not Stratification
• Rethinking Personas for Small Business, Part 2: Be the Bieber

And now, with a podcast dedicated to the topic too, I think we’ve got personas all figured out and we can kiss this topic goodbye.

We also talk about:

• the relationship of UX to general web design
• the three waves of web design work over the past 15 years
• the relationship between UX and marketing and small business
• “pages vs flows” in mock ups.
• LessConf
• Milledgeville GA
• inVision App
• aWebAhead Podcast with Jen Simmons

Smoothie of the Week – It’s mostly spinach

• two big hand-fulls of spinach
• water
• half pear
• half apple
• some ice

Also mentioned on this week’s BUX user experience podcast:

You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes – new episodes each Monday!

Watch us on Youtube | Follow us on Twitter | Friend us on Facebook

Your Use of Personas is Based on Fear

There. I said it.

If you’re in favor of personas, I think it’s because you believe that by not using them, you’re leaving money on the table.

Well I’m here to convince you that by using personas, chances are very good that you ARE in fact leaving money on the table. Simply put, I think you’re hurting your bottom line.

When you see the word ‘personas’, you should be afraid. Be very afraid.

Your Fear Personified

The late, great, Mitch Hedberg had a classic stand up bit:

I’m not into sports. I mean, I like Gatorade but that’s about as far as it goes. By the way, you don’t have to be sweaty and holding a basketball to enjoy a Gatorade. You could just be a thirsty dude. Gatorade forgets about this demographic. I’m thirsty for absolutely no reason. Other than the fact that liquid has not touched my lips for some time. Can I have a Gatorade too, or does that lightning bolt mean “No”?

If you believe in personas, when you hear that you think, “Hot damn, good thinking! Johnson! Let’s rework that lightning bolt and get an ad of a dude just being thirsty and play it everywhere. In no way will this distract from 30 years of sports marketing.”

Has the fact that Gatorade has exclusively marketed itself to the sports market kept you from drinking one?

I’m not on a diet. So why am I drinking Diet Coke? Shouldn’t they have a message (and experience) tailored for me? Oh, that’s right. Coke Zero. But whose market did Coke Zero cannibalize? I bet it’s Diet Coke’s market share. And which one am I drinking today? Diet Coke.

So what gives? Why does Mitch want a Gatorade and I want a Diet Coke even though the primary marketing messages for these products don’t specifically apply to us? And isn’t it highly weird that he wants Gatorade, not Powerade and I want a Diet Coke, not Coke Zero or Diet Pepsi?

Doesn’t this go against all of the available data suggesting that behavioral market segmentation is a good idea?

The Truth as I See It

I believe that 99% of websites exist within a paradigm where designing to the paradigm is more important that designing for the user. The use of personas in websites is unnecessary. Everything can be defined with the use of flows, paths, and goals.

Personas, if they have any use at all, are best used during the product or service development stage of the process. By the time we get around to building a website, the heavy lifting needs to be done.

The goal of a web designer is to understand your product or service and to create a website that allows your users to buy, sell, consume, share, or return your product or service.

These acts: buying, selling, consuming, sharing, and returning are all established online behaviors. Most businesses don’t need to push the envelope in these arenas. They need tried-and-true web behaviors that are going to work.

And the Internet is filled with them!

There are style guidelines, color guidelines, syntax guidelines, word efficacy guidelines, etc. There are guidelines for how to write guidelines. We know how to build a freakin’ website. It doesn’t take a persona to show us the best-practices for web development.

Take a Lesson from the Record Industry

It’s no secret that the music industry is based on making hit records. Long gone are the days where most labels would sign niche talent. The only labels who do that today are themselves small niche businesses. Sony, BMG and the like are only interested if you can potentially move millions of units.

If you look at the records that sell millions of copies, you’ll see that for some reason they just about always appeal to a wide audience.

Take a song like “Moves Like Jagger”. It premiered during the first season of NBC’s “The Voice”, was a hit at radio, and can be currently heard as background music in grocery stores around the country. You know if you’ve made it into grocery stores that you’re reaching a wide audience. Like “everybody” wide.

You should too.

The persona people remind me of the cool kids who know about music that you’re not hip to and they look down on you for not knowing about it. They look at the pop charts and see who is selling a lot of records and declare loudly that “they suck”. Then they head off to their small venue and enjoy their music with a small crowd.

Meanwhile Justin Bieber is selling out arenas and getting paid because he appeals to a wide audience. Oh, and his video for “Baby” is the #1 most watched video on the Internet of all time.

If it were up to you, would you rather have Justin Bieber’s revenue or Joe Cool’s band’s revenue?

A Walking Persona Disaster

The big mistake that companies make is using personas when developing a website.

This is, as Newman is fond of saying, an example of problem seeking over problem solving. (The original quote is from Marty Gage at Lextant.)

When we seek out problems, especially at the beginning of the process, we end up introducing distracting solutions into the final website. And because of this, the website always under-performs.

As an example, let’s look at LessAccounting.

LessAccounting, for the unfamiliar, is an online accounting software app for small businesses. They’ve hired me to redesign their brochure site for them and if you’ve been following along at home, you’re already familiar with my research and wireframe work for them from previous posts.

The problem with their current website, at least as I see it, is that it has been persona’d to death. Their website appeals to so many specific people that it doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Look at the above picture. How many different messages can you spot.

I count at least seven.

Look again.

1. Current Quickbooks users
2. People who have to play with the demo
3. Wise asses
4. Business owners who are new to bookkeeping (the video gives an overview of what bookkeeping is)
5. A beginner bookkeeper
6. A novice bookkeeper
7. An advanced bookkeeper

This to me is craziness. It’s total schizophrenia.

This page doesn’t clearly state the Big 3:

• What am I?
• Who am I for?
• What is my value proposition?

Instead the design fractures that message by providing answers to a bunch of problems that haven’t happened yet and by asking questions about me.

I’m suffocating in a sea of choice and I don’t know what they want me to do.

I guess I’m supposed to decide whether I’m a beginner, a novice, or an expert at bookkeeping – something that until this point I’ve managed to get through life without considering.

I’m a little off balance because I can’t figure out why defining my bookkeeping skill level matters. That part is very unclear to me at this point. And while it might sound weird for me to feel off balance, it’s a natural psychological response to the fear of losing. I don’t want to make the wrong choice.

What I could use right now is clarity. I want to make the right choice. But I’m not confident that I will because I’m confused. I don’t know which click will lead to making the “right” choice.

I don’t know what you want me to do. I’m on your front page and already I’m lost.

This is what’s known as a bad thing.

A Call for Clarity

When I did my redesign, I did so without any customer input. This is a fact that I struggled with philosophically. Ultimately I decided that doing competitor research was adequate. After all, there are bigger players in this market. Why not learn from them?

What I wanted to do was to control the message. My feeling is that when somebody goes to a website, they have a certain amount of energy that they are willing to exert to find what they are looking for on a website before they will leave. The total amount of energy that somebody starts with is mostly dictated by the kind of website you have. In the case of LessAccounting, it was my feeling that people would have a minimum of energy to get through the website.

Everything about bookkeeping is a drag. That’s why LessAccounting leads with “we just suck less”. Bookkeeping sucks. It’s not a secret.

As you can imagine, reasonable people want to engage in this whole process as little as possible. Therefore, people who are thinking of using LessAccounting are likely to have little patience for any kind of confusion on the website. The whole bookkeeping process is irritating to them and so there’s not a whole lot of goodwill on LessAccounting’s behalf going on when a user shows up on the LessAccounting’s frontpage.

LessAccounting deals with this problem by speaking right to it: WE SUCK LESS!

Control the Message

What I want to do is to grease the rails, to take control, and to truly make it suck less.

Where the website currently gives you choice, I want to take it away.

Where they want to show you more, I want to show you less.

And more than that, I want to change their marketing message.

Currently, they like to pick fights with their market competitors. Quickbooks in particular. In boxing this is known as “punching up”.

It’s a good look for an energy drink, but not for a financial app.

Financial programs should have the demeanor of a trusted financial adviser: conservative, smart, and reassuring. You want to feel like your financial adviser already has money. The bro-speak undermines that image.

By being what you profess to be, you fix the very problems you purport to solve.

I don’t mean for that to sound like I just made the most obvious statement of the century. Rather, what I mean is that the core values of the company have to be baked in at every level.

LessAccounting already answers their own phones. Great customer service is part of their organizational structure.

By knowing thyself – a key takeaway from Part 1 in this series – it’s possible to more fully realize it on the website.

And this is how I realized it:

What I Like About It

The message on this page is consistent and flows from box to box and it answers the Big 3 questions:

• What am I? – “Small Business loves LessAccounting – It’s everything you need in a small business book keeping app and nothing you don’t.”
• Who am I for? – “Small businesses”
• What is my value proposition? – there are 5 reasons listed on the frontpage and 18 more in the tour

It also adds in the icons for publications where LessAccounting has been featured as trust building images but to be fair, the current site has those too, albeit further down on the page than I do.

There’s a flow to the entire website. It looks as though it’s structured to push people to try the app as quickly as possible. There are four big green buttons (and a button in the top menu) that make this suggestion. But, we know that psychologically most people are going to click the “tour” link. It’s on the page as often as the “try it” button is but the risk is less for the user. So it’s likely what they will click.

The tour (not pictured) is three pages long and is used in a liner fashion. On each page there’s one main point about the app that’s supported by six chunks of content. At the end of the tour, the user has spent 2-3 minutes learning about the app and is now prepared to try it. The obvious next step is to click the green button. In fact, it’s the only next step.

And that’s by design.

I’m controlling the narrative.

Technically you can click around the footer and explore a bit but for the most part, the website has been boiled down to its essence: A frontpage, a tour, and a pricing page. A demo is available but only with an email address and it’s a guided demo rather than an open-ended tour.

No matter what you do, each step of the way, it’s managed.

Gone are the personas. The website uses language that applies to everybody. Gone is the confusion. And all that’s left is a clear presentation of what the app is, who it’s for, and it’s value proposition.

That, to me, is what ux is about. Clarity.

Takeaways

If you’re building or rebuilding a website, kick personas to the curb. They don’t help here. They’re meant for the product development cycle, not the website design cycle.

Know your product. Build your website to fully showcase that product and control the narrative.

Find a broad message that works and infuse it throughout your website.

Do not split your main message and infuse all of those messages throughout your website. You’ll confuse the crap out of everybody.

Use goals, flows, and broadly meaningful narratives to drive users down your critical path.

Think pop, not punk.

Be the Bieber.

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As a ux professional, I have a confession to make. I hate personas. Hate them.

I hate them because they’re stupid. They’re made up. They’re improperly applied. And they are fake. And stupid. Aargh! I hate them. So. Much.

I think we can all agree those are good reasons.

Did I mention they’re stupid?

Fine.

I hate them because they are terrible at what they do.

I think the job of ux is to bring clarity to the situation. We amplify signal and cut out the noise.

That is supposed to be the purpose of personas. They help us understand the wants and needs of the various customers for a product or service.

But in practice, I’ve only found them to muddy the waters. They do the exact opposite of their intent and create useless data about minutia instead of providing insight into how best to build (or rebuild) a website.

That being said, what are the chances that everybody else – super smart people who I look up to professionally – who “get” personas are wrong and somehow I’ve seen the light? Not great. But before I go full-Rambo on personas (and by full Rambo I mean “get seriously emotionally destabled and then blow something up violently all while wearing a tight leather necklace around my tree stump of a neck”), let’s check with teh Interwebz and see what that series of tubes has to say on the topic.

Persona Love

As it turns out, some people just love personas.

“Personas are great. No seriously, they are the best thing since sliced bread. I can’t think of any project involving UX that doesn’t benefit from the addition of good old personas.” – UXforthemasses.com

“Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience” – UXmag.com

“Everyone that I’ve introduced them to recently, as part of the overall UX process, seems to have a negative association with them that is usually based upon some Marketing driven personas that they’ve been exposed to previously and have seen little value in. So in this 2-part piece, here’s how I explain the how they are created and differences in how they are used.” – asinthecity.com

Personas Explained

Go on… I’m listening.

Hip me to some shit! I mean, don’t make me lace these boots up and put a bandana on, while well oiled…

In the article from the above quote, Ben Melbourne breaks down personas into three types. It’s good stuff. I’ve not seen this before. He takes this info from Wikipedia.

Now my earballs are all perked up! Automatically I can see that to this point I’ve been conceiving of personas as marketing personas. When personas are described in terms of user personas – defining the goals and behavior of users – it seems like they can be a force for good.

By the way, this is Ben Melbourne. We both just learned something from this guy.

Now do you see why it was important to bring it up? (And no, I didn’t Photoshop that…)

He goes on to state the two roles of ux personas in a project:

1. Represent the findings of research into user behaviours.
2. Provide guidance on decisions in the design and development process.

It’s about this time that I’m starting to feel the wheels come off.

And it’s not just because these roles are so mushy.

I’m sorry, I’m still not convinced

I thought the well coiffed Ben Melbourne had me going there. He was going to talk me into the value of personas. But he lost me in one paragraph.

This paragraph ends up in every article on personas. It’s the moment that personas go from a good idea to a goddamn hand-holding kumbaya moment for the ux team.

A well-researched and constructed persona almost becomes another member of the team. Once everyone starts referring to a persona by name it can feel like they are there in the room with you, providing direction about what they would do, their behaviours, mental models and goals when undertaking specific tasks.

What. The fuck.

WHO DOES THIS?

Seriously. What small business person has so many types of customers that it’s necessary to break their specific goals down and then assign them a human name?

I’m asking. Do you do this? Has anybody you’ve ever met done this? If so, tell me in the comments. I want to talk to them. Put ‘em on the podcast because I don’t see it. I’m reflecting on my clients and I can’t see how giving a goal a human name is in anyway anything other than laughable.

I am Jack's checkout process.

There’s A Better Way

When you were growing up and especially when you’re a teenager you hear this phrase a lot, “just be yourself”.

If you were anything like me that statement seemed totally loaded. As a teenager, how many of us knew who we were? I remember at the time trying to hurry up and grow into an adult. “Be yourself” rang about as true as “you can be anything you want to be”. It was so grandiose as to be permanently elusive.

But, the older you get, the more that phrase starts to make sense. We do have ways of behaving that we consider to be our core self. And the advice “just be yourself” is to embrace that person and to wholly realize it through your actions.

That’s what “just be yourself” means. It means to be the most you that you can be.

What’s This Have To Do With Personas?

I’m glad you asked.

Personas make you start by asking, “Who are the people that are using my site and what do they want?” – or in dating speak “How can I get her to like me!?”

It’s not that that’s a bad question, it’s that it’s in the wrong place. You’re making the customer the center of attention. But they’re not. At this stage of the game, you are.

Here, let me highlight that for you: You’re the center of attention.

Or to break it down in dating-speak again: “She’s got to feel you before you can feel her.”

Knowing this, it’s your responsibility to figure out what it is that you do. And if you’re just now figuring this out when it’s time to design a website, I think you did your business plan wrong.

The proper place for personas

It’s not that personas are themselves bad. It’s that they’re used in the wrong place. They’re typically used way too late in the process. Personas are helpful to businesses when defining a product or service. They help you define who you are. But that isn’t to be mistaken with the idea that you should talk to each of those people individually on your website.

Crazy talk? We’ll see.

Better than personas: Know Thyself

The guiding question isn’t “What do my users want?”, it’s “Who am I?”.

If you can answer that question completely and realize it completely then you’ll be 1000x further down the road than by meeting the needs of a bunch of made up representations of your customer base.

I know this sounds a bit heretical in the context of a website that’s built on user testing but it’s the truth.

The best way to build the optimal website is the same as the best way to have an optimal life:

KNOW THYSELF

This is step 1 in the process.  This is business 101 stuff right here.  You have to know who you are.

That is the signal. That is what you have to project.

The argument for personas is that different types of customers will be more receptive to that signal if it’s modified in a way to better suit them. And I’m sure that on some level this is true. But the collective stratification of the signal into various sub-frequencies has an overall deleterious effect on the main message. And in the end, rather than coming across as talking everybody’s language, the message comes across as wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed, and frankly, confusing.

That’s not to say that personas can’t be done well. I’ve just never seen the projects where they were used successfully.  If you have any examples, hit me up in the comments. I’d love to see them.

Rather than argue for or against personas, really, I’m in favor of presenting a strong signal. I believe that most products sell themselves with one idea.

Does Coke use personas? Because EVERYBODY drinks Coke but all I can every think about when visualizing their marketing is either their bottle shape or that damn polar bear.

And don’t lie. You know you do too. But why not throw some baby seals and walruses in there as well? Surely there’s a persona that represents some demographic that drinks Coke that prefers those animals to polar bears.

I’d argue that it’s because the polar bear is a powerful enough signal to stand on its own across personas. Enough people go “aww” when they see that polar bear that adding in other animals (or messages) would only be distracting.

Wrapping it up

At the end of the day, personas suggest that message clarity is achieved by fracturing the message into small, more targeted messages.

I am leery of this.

I grew up working in the music business and they learned one lesson really good: You’re in the business of making hits. Appeal to the widest audience.

I believe this is a fundamental truth. There will always be a wide base appeal for how to talk about your product or service. Even when the product is niche – how to get your customers to buy it on a website is not. Everybody looks for the same attributes: credibility, authority, trustworthiness, affordability, relevance and so forth.

That’s where I believe designers should spend their time: honing those messages into a big fat signal that comes across loud-and-clear.

That beats the stratification-by-personas any day.

Next Time

Next time we’ll look at how using personas can get you in trouble and how knowing thyself can rescue you from persona hell.

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Mama said I should gain some weight!  This is my attempt at some calories and some good nutrition into my skinny ass body.  The banana and the yogurt make a solid middle and the yogurt gives it balance and some crisp flavor.  The protein?  It makes it seem like it’s not a desert.  And, I suppose it’s good for the bodybuilder and your body needs it.

Here’s what goes in it:

• whole banana
• 1/4 cup of Greek Yogurt
• 2 tablespoons of peanut butter
• water and milk (ratio to taste, amount to texture)
• add scoop of Protein powder

If you want it to be a little colder and more milk-shaky, add ice while blending until you reach your desired consistency.

In the meanwhile, our conversation meanders to topics about SaaS pricing, the value of UX toolkit items, being initiated into the world of data awareness, and of course…

Smoothie of the Week – Peanut Butter Banana Power!

• whole banana
• 1/4 cup of Greek Yogurt
• 2 tablespoons of peanut butter
• water and milk (ratio to taste, amount to texture)
• blend
• add scoop of Protein powder

Also mentioned:

Joe Rogan PODCAST #184 – DEADMAU5, Brian Redban, Russell Peters, Eddie Bravo

Rage Quit – Know your Meme

Sacha Greif’s SaasTernatives

Captain Tying Knots. When you need some knots tied, you go to him.

 We make it easy to stalk us around teh Interwebz!

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If you are learning analytics like me, you should meet Avinash.  He wrote the book on web analytics and is pretty awesome (He uses that word frequently, but I don’t mind… because he is awesome.)

I was first introduced to him through his book Web analytics 2.0. My attention was drawn to the book because of the cool fractal graphic, but the Amazon reviews convinced me to buy.

Avinash Kaushik , today's BUX person of the day. All data points to awesome.

His conversational style engages the reader and makes the subject of analytics palatable to the rest of us. I can understand why he gets so many positive reviews. I cherry picked parts of the book, learned enough to know what I don’t know, and then set it down.

About a year later and fully engaged with the Better User Experience project, I ran across his analytics video blog, which led me to all his other stuff, which led me to profile him here.  If you are interested in user behavior as evidenced by web data, then you need to get to know Avinash.  Is Analytics UX? Yeah, Web analytics falls under that observation part of the cycle of user experience design.  The numbers are honest … they don’t lie.

Profile in awesome

Mr. Kaushik has written two books Web Analytics: an hour a day and Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity.Two charities,  The Smile Train and The Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation receive all proceeds from the sale of the second book – I’d call that evidence of Awesome.

He is an  analytics evangelist for Google.  In that role he produces a ‘question and answer’ video blog with Nick Mihailovski  at the GoogleAnalytics youtube channel.

Avinash cofounded  Market Motive, Inc. An educational, e-Learning startup ” dedicated to bringing you the best web-based internet marketing training and certification courses anywhere.”  [And, I believe in his training skills - I think he has the personality of a great professor.]

Of course, he is a frequent speaker at conferences all over the world and for big ass companies. Judging by his web footprint, he really is “committed to helping organizations unlock the value of Web data and to become data-driven customer centric organizations”.

He won the 2009 statistical Advocate of the year award from the American statistical Association.  I have no idea if this is cool or not – sounds kinda cool.

He maintains a web analytics blog called Occam’s Razor, going strong since 2007. He’s on Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook.

Archimedes got famous for thinking big ideas in the tub. Seriously, look it up.

Two “Ah ha” blog posts

The book is good, but like all books it’s a bit long and deep for the casual/beginning user. It was really two blog posts that gave me that “Ah ha” moment of clarity and understanding about Web analytics.

Post 1 – Data Analysis 101: Seven Simple Mistakes That Limit Your Salary

“This blogpost is a collection of tips I share with my friends who are just starting out. Each tip is a “simple” mistake that is easily avoided. My hope is that you’ll skip them if you are aware of them, and move on to making more important valuable mistakes. “

Like I said, this guy is awesome. Coming from the wild west of hobbyist web development in the 90s, I know all too well that you can make mistakes and no one will call you out on it. But you could be a unconsciously incompetent and live happily under the motto  “ignorance is bliss”.  What you need is a guy like Kaushik to gently remind you that you are wearing ninja shoes and those throwing stars are sharp.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. Learning what not to do is often easier for the beginner.  Maybe it’s that part of our brain that hates to lose something.  It’s a much stronger urge than to protect what we have, rather than gain something new. If you work with analytics and data, you probably made [or are making] these mistakes. Just like animated gifts of a mailbox or a spinning globe, they can be avoided. This post can help.

Post 2 – The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish.

The first post looks to the past and mistakes. This post looks to the future and generalized predictions.

This post talks about general marketing and web business but really got me with this:

The problem is not analytics or data (or your blood, sweat and tears). The problem is Marketing and lack of imagination in using the web/digital channels.

Here is a hard-core data guy saying that data is not the problem-that creativity and imagination is.  Sort of like our friend Sir Ken Robinson says about the problems of schooling.

Go forth, web monkeys and analytics ninja wannabes.

In the interest of brevity I’ll wrap up now. My advice to you is to get to know Avinash.  Pick up a copy of the book, read his blog, watch his ‘question / answer’ show on the GoogleAnalytics Youtube Channel.  Whether you become an analytics ninja or not, I think it will be worth your time.

In previous posts we’ve talked about how to do free user research on your competitor’s websites and we’ve talked about iterating and innovating and when to do one over the other.

Both of those topics have led us to the wireframe portion of the project.

Thirty Seconds on My Wireframing Process

This post isn’t meant to go into any depth on how to design a wireframe. But I’ll briefly tell you how I did the wireframes for LessAccounting.

First, I sketched out a tree of all the pages on the site and how they connect. The purpose wasn’t to detail every possible link but to show the general flow of traffic and to get an understanding of how many pages there were going to be.

Second, I did a lot of research. Specifically I crawled over every inch of the LessAccounting website and then looked at 4 of their competitor’s homepages and tours to see what they got right and what they got wrong. I took a lot of notes.

Third, by this time I had a rough idea of how I wanted to lay out the site. Now I needed to get specific. I wrote out in bullet point fashion what headlines should go where. Then I talked to Newman about it and got his feedback.

Fourth, I started doing pen sketches of the wireframe but my sense of relative size goes to shit pretty fast. I mean, can you draw an 18 pt. headline without measuring? If you know the secret, will you share it with the class in the comments? This quickly led to step five.

Fifth, I abandoned my pen for Photoshop. I spent the next 8 hours creating, designing and redesigning the pages until I got something I liked.

And that’s it. Then it was time to share with the LessAccounting guys. To do that, I wanted to use this tool I found through an ad on Smashing Magazine that seemed like it was going to be perfect. It’s called InVision.

InVision

InVision’s big deal is that they allow you to create a pseudo-website by connecting your various wireframes together using “hotspots”. These hotspots are boxes that you draw around content that you’d like to use as a link. Once you have all of your wireframes uploaded and you’ve created your hotspot maps, you can click through your work like it’s a real website. This provides a much needed step in the whole wireframe process because it really lets the wireframes come to life.

I had been looking for a tool like this when I ran across them. When I saw the ad, I did what I almost never do: I went to their website and signed up. (Somebody give their marketing guy a cookie.)

They make it so easy to signup that I almost though they made a mistake. Just an email address and a password and I was using the tool like they gave it to me for free. No credit card or anything. And as far as I can tell, all of the features are enabled. Nothing is crippled. It’s astonishing, actually that a company would open its doors that wide but I’m not complaining. These are folks who believe in their product.

Now, my needs are pretty simple. I have 4 pages that I want to upload: a frontpage and 3 tour pages. Once those are uploaded, I want to make the places on the comps that are supposed to be links into hotspots. That way, they behave like links.

Once that’s all done, all that’s left is to send the LessAccounting guys a link and then to get on the phone and talk it out.

InVision made all of that remarkably simple and easy.

I don’t want to sound like I’m fawning or anything but just consider this: I was able to sign up super easy, for free, and got to use a fully functional product. I was able to upload my .png files and connect the hotspots intuitively. They made it easy to share a link to the files.

The Less Team saw it earlier tonight and we’re due to talk about it in the morning.

In summary: It did everything I needed it to do, for easy and for free.

How Much Does It Cost?

Now, it’s true that the acid test will come when the 30 days are up.

They offer four plans:

Will I buy in?

As long as I have work that requires me to do wireframes, this seems like a great way to do it. I don’t know why they don’t offer 10 active projects at the Professional level, since their pricing sets you up for that, but whatevs. (Note to InVision: You could get 3 starter plans for $24/mo. and get access to 9 projects, a better deal than the professional plan. Why not make the pros feel good and give them 10 projects for $25?)

Is There Anything Not to Like?

Whenever somebody does a review, they feel obligated to come up with a list of the things they didn’t like about the product. I don’t feel this obligation.

I didn’t go and hunt for things I didn’t like. Instead, I have a few thoughts on how things work.

Three thoughts:

1 - I don’t think I need all of their features. The comment system, while potentially a great thing isn’t something I need. They have a cool system that lets people click anywhere on the comp and leave a note. This has obvious benefits when working in a group on a project. For my use though, I’d rather have the ability to ask questions – a la Usabilla or Loop11. That’s not a slight on InVision. The ability to leave comments is a nice tool to use in a group’s workflow.

2 - Their template system isn’t as obvious as it seems. At least not at first. As I understand it, you can take a comp and mark it up with hotspots. Then you can save that set of hotspots as a template. Then when you upload new files you can apply these template files. The idea here is to do your menu as a template and then when you upload new files, instead of drawing the boxes for the hotspots on each page, you can just apply the template and can be done with it.

I was in a bit of a weird place in that my design doesn’t have much of a traditional menu. It’s only got two items I need to link to at the moment, so using a template was too much for my needs. But if I were to do this regularly, I’d definitely use it.

3 - I found their system for building the hotspots and previewing the project to be pretty straightforward. Their control bar is located at the bottom of the page and for some reason, this wasn’t completely comfortable to me. I really think I’d rather have it at the top of the browser window. I know it sounds crazy to bring that up but I found myself hesitating enough thinking about what I needed to click that I noticed it.

Final Verdict

Should you try InVision? Yes. Absolutely. By all means. If you want your wireframes/comps to feel a lot like the finished product, and especially if you need to share those wireframes with others, take InVision for a spin. You literally can’t lose for 30 days. And after that, it only sets you back $8/mo.