We recently decided to create some personas to aid the design process here at SitePoint. Personas are fictitious representations of your site’s most common users. Admittedly, this is the first time we’ve ever used personas in shaping our design decisions — better late than never!
Read on to learn more about how you could help us improve these personas, and earn yourself a $100 voucher to spend at amazon.com!
Introducing The SitePoint Personas
These personas will be invaluable for helping us shape future versions of sitepoint.com. However, rather than keep them as a purely internal tool, we thought it might be fun to share our personas with you, our readers.
Allow me to introduce, for your reading pleasure, the SitePoint Personas (read the full article or read about the process I followed):
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| Erin Kikuchi the front-end coder |
Samuel Johnson the workaholic business owner |
Raj Sumandra the forum junkie |
Marco Gonzales the rebellious teenager |
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| Harvey Randolph the newbie hobbyist |
Susan Kieslinger the enthusiastic blogger |
Joseph Forrest the Googling geek |
Scott McInnes the visually impaired student |
We’ve also created a short Which Persona Are You? quiz, so you can find out which of these personas you are most like. Note: this is not meant to be a terribly scientific analysis. It’s a fun exercise that some of you will hopefully find interesting, and will help us to validate whether we’ve got it right, or missed the mark completely.
It’s More Interesting when Prizes are Involved
Here’s an incentive to take our personas quiz — do so before September 4th and you’ll go in the draw to win one of five amazon.com vouchers worth $100. Not bad for less than a minute of your time!
On Tuesday September 5th, 2009, five quiz participants will be selected at random, and will receive a $100 voucher to spend at amazon.com.
We’d love to hear what you think of these personas. Did we describe you to a tee? Are there any “typical users” that we’ve glaringly omitted?
Related Links
- Introducing the SitePoint Personas
- Build your Own Data-backed Personas
- The SitePoint Personas Quiz: Which One are You?
You can now easily embed your SitePoint Persona into the sidebar of your blog, if you so choose to! Take the quiz and you’ll be presented with a snippet of HTML that you can copy and paste to proudly tell the world which of these personas you are most like.
Matthew MagainMatthew Magain is a UX designer with over 15 years of experience creating exceptional digital experiences for companies such as IBM, Australia Post, and sitepoint.com. He is currently the Chief Doodler at Sketch Group, Co-founder of UX Mastery, and recently co-authored Everyday UX, an inspiring collection of interviews with some of the best UX Designers in the world. Matthew is also the creator of Charlie Weatherburn and the Flying Machine.
