Users & Their

Domain
Tiffany Leverenz Software Psychology

Overview
User

Profiling

Personas
Use

Cases or Scenarios

User Profiling
The

process of establishing knowledge about your users

Who are they?
Attributes of users

What is the goal in using the project?

Where will the tasks be performed?
How often are tasks performed?
What are the time constraints?

What are the tasks involved in this process?

User Profiling Methods

Questionnaires/Surveys
Interviews
Workshops

or Focus Groups

Naturalistic

Observation

User Profiling Methods

Explicit vs Implicit
Explicit provided by the user
Implicit gathered through usage data
Hybrid
Content-based vs collaborative methods
Content-based assumes that the users show the same particular
behavior under the same circumstances
Collaborative assumes that the users who belong to the same group
(e.g. of same age, sex or social class) behave similarly, and
therefore have similar profiles
Hybrid filtering method

Personas
A

representation of a fictitious user that includes a

concise summary of characteristics of the user

Effective personas:
Represent a major user group for your website
Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of the most
important user groups
Give a clear picture of the user's expectations and how they're
likely to use the site
Aid in uncovering universal features and functionality
Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values

Developing Personas
To

ensure your personas are accurate representations of

your users and have the support of your stakeholders
throughout the process, you should:
Conductuser research
Condense the research
Brainstorm
Refine
Make them realistic

Personas

Is the persona based on contextual interviews with real customers?

Does the persona appear realistic to people who deal with customers day-today?

Is each persona unique, having little in common with other personas?

Does the persona include product-relevant high-level goals and include a

quotation stating the key goal?

Is the number of personas small enough for the design team to remember
the name of each one, with one of the personas identified as primary?

Can the development team use the persona as a practical tool to make
design decisions?

Use Cases
A

written description of how users will perform tasks on

your website/software
Who is using the website/software
What the user wants to do
The user's goal
The steps the user takes to accomplish a particular task
How the website should respond to an action

Use Cases
A use case (or set of use cases) has these characteristics:
Organizes functional requirements
Models the goals of system/actor (user) interactions
Records paths (calledscenarios) from trigger events to goals
Describes one main flow of events (also called a basic course of
action), and possibly other ones, calledexceptionalflows of events
(also called alternate courses of action)
Is multi-level, so that one use case can use the functionality of
another one.

Example

http://www.gatherspace.com/static/use_case_example.html#1

Benefits of Use Cases

Help

explain how the system should behave and the

process

Brainstorm
Provide
Teams

what could go wrong

a list of goals

can negotiate functions that become requirements

What would you do?

Provide

the name of a software application and 3

possible use cases.

References

Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and
How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis, IN: Sams-Pearson Education.

Courage, C., & Baxter, K. (2005).Understanding your users: a practical guide to user requirements:
methods, tools, and techniques. San Francisco, CA: Gulf Professional Publishing.

Cufoglu, A. (2014). User Profiling-A Short Review.International Journal of Computer

Applications,108(3).

Golemati, M., Katifori, A., Vassilakis, C., Lepouras, G., & Halatsis, C. (2007, April). Creating an ontology
for the user profile: Method and applications. InProceedings of the first RCIS conference(pp. 407-412).

Liu, Y., Osvalder, A. L., & Karlsson, M. (2010).Considering the importance of user profiles in interface
design(pp. 61-80). INTECH Open Access Publisher.

Mulder, S., & Yaar, Z. (2006).The user is always right: A practical guide to creating and using personas
for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

http://www.usabilitybok.org/persona

http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/personas.html

http://www.usability.gov/

http://www.gatherspace.com/static/use_case_example.html#1