Using Personas to Include People with Disabilities
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Personas are a useful tool for UX design and for marketing, but how true-to-life are they? You can make more inclusive personas by taking a modular approach. Start from a base persona, and imagine that person in different situations. How do changing situations and circumstances change how the persona would use your product?
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Using Personas to Include People with Disabilities
- 1. Using Personas to Include People with Disabilities Caitlin Geier Feb. 12, 2018
- 2. Persona: A synthesized model based on user observation and research which represents a larger selection of users.
- 3. Persona: A fake person who represents the real people who use your product.
- 4. What information should personas have? ● Demographics ● Job / business role ● Use cases ● User journeys ● Frustrations
- 5. Persona Example ● Focus on job role ● Focus on product ● No useless statistics ● Specific frustrations
- 6. Do personas represent reality? Is everyone who uses your app young, happy, and driven?
- 7. People Aren’t Perfect. (Personas shouldn’t be, either.)
- 8. People are diverse Illustration from 7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About Accessibility by Jesse Hausler
- 9. Who else could Paula be?
- 10. Blind Paula ● Uses JAWS screen reader ● Needs sighted assistance when building reports
- 11. Deaf Paula ● Uses chat or email for product support ● Needs captions on training videos
- 12. Depressed Paula ● Easily distracted ● Hard for her to ask for help
- 13. Old Paula ● Small text is hard to read ● Hand tremors when using a mouse
- 14. Stressed Paula ● Gets angry when things don’t work ● Multitasks a lot
- 15. An Army of Paulas
- 16. Diverse Points of View Robust Applications
- 17. Design for “Edge Cases” Better for Everyone
- 18. Book Recommendations A Web for Everyone Design for Real Life Sarah Horton Whitney Quesenbery Rosenfeld Media Eric Meyer Sara Wachter-Boettcher A Book Apart
Editor's Notes
- Gonna talk about inclusive design, too - because all of this helps everyone, not just people with disabilities.
- Fancy, official definition.
- Definition that’s understandable by actual people. Point of personas: you are not your user. Personas are a tool that allow you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who uses your product and is different from you. How do you build them? By interviewing real people. Bonus point: this definition is more inclusive because it uses plain language!
- Demographics: very common, primarily useful for marketing, not much else. Might include stuff like motivation, personality, etc. Job role: common for B2B. For example, Deque makes software for companies to use, and we often define our users based on what they do - developer, manager, accessibility expert, exec, etc. Use cases: For example, “Use while in the case” is a valid use case for most apps. Frustrations: good if your app is trying to solve an existing problem. “It’s too hard for most of my employees to learn Excel” Needs: similar to frustrations, but not always negative. One we heard: “I need an accessibility checker that runs quickly and shows me exactly where the issues are.”
- Note: specifically talking about user personas, which are used in UX design, etc. Somewhat different from buyer personas Focus on people who use product, not people who purchase product Sometimes the same, sometimes not (often not for B2B software)
- The answer: yes and no. Yes: personas If all of your personas are young, happy, driven individuals, who are you leaving out?
- Key point: lots of different kinds of people can have the same job role, or the same use case, or the same frustrations.
- Think about: what particularities could different types of “Paula” have? How do those particularities come into play when Paula is using your application?
- A single persona will never capture all of the permutations of that type of users. People with disabilities get a shorter stick than most. In all cases, Paula can still be trying to balance family life and work life. Working from home and the security and performance issues stopping her from doing so is important for all of these people. Job responsibilities are still the same in all cases.
- The more you think about different points of view, the more use cases you’ll know about and will be able to design for. The more you’ll think about things like good, helpful error states and streamlined workflows. And the less likely you’ll be to accidentally alienate a group of users.
- Designing for edge cases = make sure app is sensitive to users and is easy to user in a lot of potentially stressful situation. If easy to use when under stress, or when using one hand, or when blind, will be even easier to use when none of those cases apply
- A web for everyone - Great set of personas for people with disabilities. Also great all around Design for Real Life - thinking about different use cases, particularly the ones that don’t fit the “happy path”