Communicating Deliverables and Personas

Yesterday I attended two pre-conference workshops at the IA Summit. The morning session was entitled Communicating Design and was led by Dan Brown. I’ve read his book and watched his site and have always liked his work. His class was no exception and it was filled with a variety of lessons on how to create good deliverables. Even better then seeing some of his work, which was well worth the price of admission, his ideas that go into deliverable were just as eye opening.

One immediate lesson I took away was the idea that we need to keep in mind who is reviewing our deliverables. Granted, many of his clients are external and throughout the conference that is the perspective that is maintained. But I think we can still remember who we are delivering our wireframes and flows to. We need to constantly monitor if we are going too far with details or in some cases not giving enough details. And if it’s a stakeholder that is reviewing the data, make sure you are on target with your message.

Another take away is that it’s ok to walk into a meeting with questions and to work those questions into the deliverable. Now, if the product is being converted into a prototype in a couple of days, might be a little late to ask some big picture questions. But at the beginning why not clarify questions in our deliverables. While they’re reviewing the material they’ll be in the right mindset to provide answers.

I also saw some great deliverables that I’d like to review once the slides are available. There are some ideas that we can show our stakeholders just by adjusting line weight and style (dotted vs. solid line). As we continue to work on more detailed workflows, we need to find an easy way to get across our message to stakeholders.

The second session of the day was developing guerilla personas. The main takeaway was that we may not have a lot of time and/or facts to build out our personas. But we need to have some idea of who our users are and need to address them in our designs and decisions. And guess what, we have a lot more to go on than we think.

The few items that we need to produce these personas are our search logs, referring keywords, metrics and possible call center or questions. We can read through all of these data points and build out a for lack of better words, virtual user. And there is nothing that we is wrong with this. These are data points that are based on user numbers. Why not review our metrics and see what our users are doing. Our search engine logs can also provide great data points. What are they looking for and who do we think is the user that is entering the search terms.