Know Thy User® - a four stage approach

When world-famous landscape architect Lancelot Capability Brown designed a garden, he created it first without paths. He would then wait for a light dusting of snow and use the footprints to see where visitors would like to walk. Only then would he add in the paths using this insight.

We feel the same way about digital projects. Before we truly understand what your users want, we can’t start creating their journeys.

We completely focus on people - understanding their needs to ensure that the design, information architecture and content meet their needs; not what your organisation thinks they need. User experience is not just the location of a button on a page or an image they see – it is a complete amalgamation of their online and offline experience with your business.

The modern digital user can access services from anywhere using any type of device and in almost any environment - how possibly can this sheer scope of variation be accommodated?

Step one

At Greenwood Campbell, we don’t believe that traditional demographics and ‘personas’ are the best way to understand your users. To reach a fundamental understanding of your audience, you have to understand their motivation and this goes beyond age, gender or socio-economic background.

We need to understand individual user stories, what motivates them, what they are trying to achieve and how we can help them do it.

For example, you could have two Extinction Rebellion activists, one who is 25, trans-gender from Lewisham and one who is 75, female from Rotheram. Both have very different backgrounds but their motivation is the same to try to avoid irreversible climate change.

Understanding this distinction is key to understanding how to reach your users, speak to them about what they want to hear and inspire them to take action.

Step two

Once we understand their varying motivations, we should research the mood, device, location and environment that the different users could be in.

Mood

We look at the user’s emotion - how are they feeling? Are they anxious, stressed, angry, concerned? A user's mood could be very different if they are booking a holiday or paying their taxes. This needs to be reflected in the user experience.

Motivation

Understanding the ‘why’ is the most important stage of user research, next we work to understand ‘what’ they want to achieve and finally ‘how’ we can help them do this.

Environment

Next we look at what physical space the user is in and take into account the distractions all around them - are they on the sofa with their family? Are they walking their dog? Are they in a hospital? How will all these factors contribute to their user experience?

Device

We also look at the device and OS the user may be using, are they using their voice? Smartphones constantly distract us with notifications so a website’s user experience needs to get their message across quickly and succinctly.

Location

Finally, we look at the geographical location the users could be in and what we may need to consider. Rural areas typically have poorer network connectivity therefore large videos and imagery will negatively impact their experience on the website. How can we mitigate this?

All of these factors will have a definitive effect on the tone of voice, and navigation for the user. This thinking and research enables us to understand the specific user stories so that we can design a supportive and effective digital experience.

Step three

The next stage of understanding your users is creating emotional maps, these help us understand how the users feel at different stages of their journey.

Step four

Once you have created your new wireframes or design, it’s vital that you take them to real users and gather feedback. Firstly on the look and feel of the design, but also usability of the wireframes and their emotional reaction to the concept.

We use a blend of qualitative and quantitative questioning to gather feedback and typically would use a remote, unmoderated usability test. This allows us to use a higher number of participants and facilitate the direct completion of set tasks. With this test, we use quantitative data to assess the efficacy of the new design and architecture.

Task identification

Based on the pre-agreed goals, we develop five tasks for participants to complete. Each task is a closed task, which means that participants need to find a specific webpage or piece of information to successfully complete the task.

We then select a range of tasks that can be completed on the website, with little or no overlap across tasks. By using a variety of tasks, we can use our test to assess the website as a whole, as opposed to just a portion or segment of the website.

All of the feedback will be collated into an extensive report and considered for a second iteration.

The tools we use to complete this part of the testing process include:

Real word user testing

Real world user testing is Greenwood Campbell’s unique method of understanding just how people really interact with digital experiences in their daily lives. There used to be a time when user experience testing meant a group of people sat at desks in a lab running through test scripts. This worked well for a time, allowing agencies and brands to start to get an understanding of how users used their websites however, this should no longer be the way we solely test user experience.

With ‘mobile first’ being the choice for the majority of users and an increase in home working, there are many distractions to consider when creating digital experiences. By giving real functionality to users on their actual devices, they can be tested by real people in the real world. We rig up our testers with head-mounted cameras, we track their eyes and their fingers so we can truly understand how they are using your site.

An example of this is a project we delivered for LV=. They wanted to test whether their customers would purchase life insurance via a mobile device.

Once we had developed 3 different working prototypes, we took these to customers to gather insights and feedback for a second iteration. To watch us in action use the QR code.

We call this process ‘Know Thy User®’