Site Persona

Now we have some site goals and some users’ goals … let’s bring them together.

Not only can you create personas for the people who are visiting your site, but you can also create a persona for your site itself. This seems a bit weird at first … it’s a site, it’s not a person! But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense – when you visit a website you often find yourself talking to it or yourself as you interact – “oh very flashy, but where is your search box?!” or “where am I going to find the jobs section – under About Us or Our Company?”. You form some kind of a relationship with the website, albeit a rather superficial one! Sites you come back to again and again are the sites you like, and feel comfortable with – they are friendly and familiar. So how can I define my site’s personality? Or at least what I would like it to be like?

In Web Design from Scratch, Ben Hunt lists some points to consider when thinking about the characteristics of your site:

• Relationship to the consumer (e.g. guide / assistant / professional advisor / companion)
• Overall quality (e.g. value / class / high-fashion / workmanship / trashy)
• Relative positioning to other brands (e.g. up-and-coming / challenger / established / old-school / hyper-modern / reliable / edgy)
• Personality (fun / quiet / safe / logical / aloof)

Here’s some characteristics I’ve come up with for the IGER site:

informer, guide, helper, professional, reliable, trustworthy, faithful, established, lively, safe, fun, friendly

This is what I am imagining while putting the characteristics together:

A young, confident female scientist. She’s bubbly, nice, smiley & fresh-faced. She’s keen to help and is polite and knowledgeable. She’s intelligent but doesn’t patronise. She’s excited about science and ready to share that excitement.

She sounds like a good person to know! I’m not sure why she’s female – maybe it’s because I am? But it just seems to suit the ideas I have about the site’s personality somehow.

Site Goals

One of the very first questions you should be asking yourself (or your colleagues) when starting work on a new website is … why? Why are we making this site? What is it for? These questions don’t go away when you’re doing a redesign – just because you already have a website, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily obvious why you have one. You may just have one because it seemed like a good idea at the time! You may have created the original site with a purpose in mind, but the purpose may now have changed. Perhaps the company’s aims have changed, perhaps they’re trying to reach out to a different audience. Whatever the reason, it seems that going back to basics and thinking about why you need the website is a very good place to start.

One of the places I have discovered on the wonderful web is Web Design from Scratch. Here’s what Ben Hunt has to say about this:

Know what the site needs to do

You may have a client who tells you what they want (e.g. “We want to break into the big time and sell more widgets.”).

Try to get really clear about what the goals of a site are. What does success look like? How will you know when you’ve got there?

Having this stuff clear in your mind helps you:

1. make the thousands of design decisions between now and a finished product
2. communicate with your client and maintain their confidence throughout the process
3. show that you’ve done what you set out to do

So what might the goal(s) of your site be?

• brand promotion
• selling products
• data capture
• marketing
• legal obligations
• knowledge transfer
• demonstrate effectiveness
• educate & inform
• collaboration opportunities
• recruitment

The next step is to look at your audience, your users – what are their goals when visiting your site? More to come …