Users key to site revamp

Cimex Producer, David Mercado, explains how the interactive company is using personas and scenarios to make sure Ability’s new website works for its demanding users:

Later this year, Ability will be launching a new website – www.abilitymagazine.org.uk – developed by Cimex.

Cimex is developing the site to meet international accessibility standards with the help of a group of users working in their central London-based usability lab.

The site will reach W2C WCAG 1.0 AA level with some elements of AAA where appropriate. The site has been tested with disabled users to ensure that it is fully accessible.

Cimex interviewed a number of representative readers of Ability as part of the requirements’ gathering process for the new website. Discussions focussed on the strengths and weaknesses of the existing website and how it could be improved.

The discussions were documented in the form of personas and scenarios. A persona is a fictional user created to represent a user group. The development team created this user as an aggregate of the real users they have observed and interviewed.

Each persona has a name, photo, likes and dislikes, habits, background and expectations, and any other information that will help the development team identify with the user. Most importantly, personas list key goals for the user.

They are very easy to use and understand. Instead of having to remember 20-30 requirements, they are grouped into personas and brought to life in this way. It is always easier to remember a person and their characteristics rather than remembering an unstructured set of characteristics.

So personas bring requirements into the users’ context and help translate them successfully into design. One of Ability’s personas is a 35-year-old diversity manger from a bank.

For each persona, a short scenario was developed about how the persona would use the site and the representative tasks that they needed to do. This way, it was easy to focus on a variety of real users and their goals.

Cimex carried out an expert review of the existing website and restructured the website’s information architecture improving usability and accessibility. Personas and scenarios were used to inform the information architecture, ensuring that the new site meets user needs and requirements.

A new site map was created with extra features such as a section with articles contributed by users, online subscription, a log in area and product news.

In addition, Cimex produced wireframes (pages that just show the structure of the site) that depicted its main sections and templates of functions. The templates were further tested with users to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the new Ability magazine website.

The wireframe user testing aimed to assess whether the basic information architecture structure of the new Ability Magazine website is user friendly, intuitive and effective. This occurred early in the process where changes could be made at minimum cost.

The next step is to carry out a second round of testing with the participants including vision impaired users and users with motor and cognitive impairments.