Discovering user needs
This work was conducted as part of a larger project to improve a website for a North Carolina government agency. The first step was to determine the needs of the users who would be interacting with the website. We started by conducting focus groups with the internal employees who used the current website the most, as well as the employees who interacted with members of the public the most.
In the focus group, we asked these participants to brainstorm and create personas for the types of people they interact with and the types of tasks those people are trying to complete on the website. As a group, we facilitated discussion to create a final number of 12 personas based on the many different tasks the website must be able to support.
Using the personas to identify major needs
With this many personas and types of tasks that were identified as very important in the focus group, it was a challenge to determine how to present and use this data when designing the new website.
To make understanding these requirements easier, I created a visualization which categorized personas based on the type of person (color), the persona (individual dots), and the task those personas must be able to complete on the website (horizontal axis). This helped the design team to visualize which tasks were most important for all users (task 4) and which tasks were only needed for specific types of users (tasks 5 and 8). This allowed the team to prioritize certain tasks, while still remaining aware of how the other tasks were important to different users.
Mak Pryor 