Hello everybody, my name is Brian Lewis and today I’m going to be talking about user scenarios. What are users scenarios? A lot of you are probably familiar with a persona and a scenario is very similar to a persona, but with some slight differences. Personas are very demographically driven. An example of persona would be a 33-year-old soccer mom who has two kids, drives a minivan, and goes to church on weekends. Personas can be very good for product development purposes. But for optimizing your website for conversion, we found that user scenarios work even better.
The user scenario, similar to a persona, is comprised of 2 main elements: the role of the visitor and the task. When it comes to the user role, think about the context that brings the visitors to the site. What is their level of knowledge about your product or services? What other motivations or what biases might they have? What levels of fear? What would be the real motivators for them? We want to think about what’s going on in their mind.
Next, consider the task, which is a little bit easier to grasp. Why are they on the site? What is it that they’re looking to accomplish? We want to make sure we’re incorporating both the role and the task because that is going to help give us the blueprint for how we’re going to design the site. Once we’ve identified the key user scenarios, which generally there are about 5 for your site, you’ve then identified the typical types of visitors to your site. Now you know how to design your homepage, your internal pages, and your navigation to make sure that it is very clear and intuitive for those visitors to accomplish the task that they’re looking for. Thank you.
