Before you start writing, think about who will read and use your content. Your user groups may be:
- broad, such as the general public, parents or government staff
- more specific, such parents of high school children, health researchers or web designers.
You are often likely to have several user groups. For example, your report may be read by industry professionals and the general community.
User profiles and personas both describe your users, but different aspects of them:
- Profiles are about the measurable characteristics of your users – such as age, gender, education level and income.
- Personas are about the behaviour of your users – what drives them, and why they behave a certain way. Personas include information such as their motives, habits, likes and dislikes, and their goals.
Profiles
Once you have identified your users, you can describe their characteristics in a user profile. Profiles can help you understand what your users might be experiencing. You can explore:
- demographic information. What are your users’ life circumstances, such as age, gender, income, geographic location, cultural environment, ethnicity, language background, literacy level or educational level?
- behavioural information. How might your users prefer to engage with your content, including format, length, frequency, static versus interactive, time of day, location and preferred sources (e.g. experts, data, personal anecdotes)? What technological constraints need to be considered, such as rural or remote areas with slower internet speeds? How will the user be likely to find, use and share the information?
- role information. What are the roles of members of your audiences? How might their roles affect their need for information, and what they will do with the information? What do they value when receiving information (such as financial implications, data or something else)? Will they receive the information directly (primary audience) or through someone else (secondary audience)?
You might not need to define all characteristics all the time. For example, if you are writing technical guidance for soil scientists, their gender, income or lifestyle choices might not matter. The profile information can guide your content development, including focus, structure, breadth, depth, voice, tone and vocabulary.
User-centred design and personas
User-centred design means putting users' needs and wants at the heart of your content creation process. One way to facilitate user-centred design is to use ‘personas’ to bring your users to life. Personas can help you understand why your users are behaving in a certain way.
A persona is an invented character designed to embody important characteristics of a specific user group. Each persona has a name and a clear set of motivations for engaging with your content. Personas are most often used for the development of online content, but can be used for any content.
This technique can help content creators see the world from a user’s point of view and think about what the user needs from the content. The persona can help you to review content and resolve questions or problems. For example, you can ask yourself questions such as:
- ‘What questions would Anna want answered?’
- ‘What would David search for in this instance?’
- ‘Would Prashan understand the background information or do we need to explain it?’
Creating a persona
Personas should be created as early as possible in the content development process, and referred to as you develop and refine your content. If you have a project team, consider involving all or some of the team in developing personas, to gain different perspectives.
It is best to create personas based on user research data. If you do not have time or budget for significant user research, you can review forum discussions on similar topics or use Google Analytics data – something that is cost- and time-effective. Even a small amount of data to inform your content is better than none.
Personas should encompass any characteristics that would inform the user’s relationship with the content. Some details are relevant in some contexts but not others. For example, the persona characteristics you might develop for a personal training website would be very different to those for a financial advice website, even if the persona is similar.
The information you gathered when developing your audience profiles can be used for creating the personas.
The personas should reflect the different needs and wants of different users. Creating more than 1 persona allows you to design your content for users with varying requirements, backgrounds and behaviours. Having several simple personas with different needs is more useful than having 1 or 2 complex personas covering several needs.
You can also include people with special needs when you are creating your personas, to ensure that you meet their needs. See Users with diverse needs for more information.
Using personas
Once you have developed your personas, use them throughout content development. The personas are your touchstone for any content questions.
While you are first drafting content, keep your personas in mind, and use them to guide and drive the direction and focus of content development. The easiest way to do this is to ask questions or set scenarios:
In writing a booklet about the health risks associated with exposure to asbestos in the home and how to safely handle asbestos materials, your personas might be:
Mary, a first-time home owner who has just bought an older house
Nalini, who is planning to build an extension to her family room
José, who is a plasterer involved in domestic renovation work.
By giving the personas specific roles, it is easier to see what questions they might ask and how best to explain things to them. In writing the text, ask yourself:
What would Mary want to know about the possible risks and how to protect her family?
What does Nalini need to know about approval and safe renovation processes?
How can I write this to convince José of the importance of health and safety measures?
It is also important to keep the personas alive throughout the whole writing and editing process:
- Make personas visible. Perhaps make them into cardboard cut-outs or posters. Ask attendees to come to planning sessions in the character of a particular persona and provide input from that point of view.
- Keep talking about your personas to make sure you are meeting their needs. You can appoint people in the team to lead an ongoing discussion of the personas, or just talk about them in meetings and planning sessions.
- Update and revise as you obtain new information about your target audience or if the audience changes. Just like real people, personas should change over time. You may need to develop new personas or discard redundant ones. You can schedule regular update sessions for this.
Using personas with scenarios
Personas are most meaningful when used in conjunction with ‘scenarios’. Scenarios are invented situations that imagine how the persona would interact with your content. Your scenario should include:
a situation or event
a context (e.g. the physical setting, the people involved, the emotions that might be experienced)
the task or goal you want the person to achieve.
To draft new content using scenarios, think about who you are writing for and what they need to know in a particular situation. This will help ensure that the content is relevant and engaging for the reader.
Context: You are developing an allergy information website for health professionals, which provides information on recommended treatments.
Persona: Kamal is a general practitioner working in a small country town. He has a busy practice with a wide range of patients.
Scenario: Kamal has an appointment with the parents of a young patient whose asthma is getting worse.
New content considerations:
What are the top 3 treatment options that Kamal can talk to the parents about?
What are the different considerations with these treatments (e.g. efficacy, cost, time)?
Is there anything that would make a treatment unsuitable (e.g. age, other health conditions)?
Does the rural setting make a difference to the advice (e.g. will travel be needed)?
What other supports can Kamal suggest to the parents?
Scenarios are also very useful to test drafted content, to see if it is working in the way that you imagined.
To test existing or newly drafted content, set the scenario and follow it through by imagining what the persona would do at each stage of the process. Any difficulties you experience during the process tell you that the content may need to change, or you may need other solutions to help your users find what they need.
Context: You are developing a carer support website, which provides information about services and support for unpaid carers.
Persona: Angela is an unpaid carer who looks after her mother, who has dementia. Angela is stressed and has little time to find information online, usually using her tablet to do so in spare moments in her kitchen.
Scenario: Angela wants to find out about resources in her local area that she can call on if she needs someone to look after her mother in an emergency.
What Angela will find on the carer support website: The draft website has 2 sources for this information:
A ‘Who to call’ box has clear information, but Angela might not see it because it is at the bottom of the page, and many users do not look there.
Action: Consider moving the box to the top of the page.A separate page on respite care has a lot of useful information but is quite dense.
Action: Consider rewriting to make sure key information is at the top, or develop a summary box to go in a side column.
Angela might also search for the information using the website’s search function. The relevant pages did not come up in a search for ‘emergency’ or ‘emergency care’. The pages only came up if she typed ‘respite’.
Action: Consider adding to the ‘best bets’ search function other terms that users might use (see Navigation for online content for more information on best bets). User data on the preferred search terms would be useful here.