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Persona development for internal and external audiences
- Scenario development
- Task analysis
We hear a lot about the customer experience—but who is your customer? And what is their experience? Many companies have a fragmented view of their customer—marketing has one view, engineering has another. Those views are often driven by industry segment, product line or demographics. But those views of the customer don't tell you how your customer is using your product. They don't tell you about the Customer Experience.
More and more, customers learn about your company through information you deliver through websites. How can the content you develop and deliver make a difference for your customers? How can it drive both a superior customer experience and increase efficiency within your organization? It begins with knowing your customer and understanding their needs by developing a 360 degree view of your user. There are three component to this view: persona, scenario, and task analysis.
Persona Development
In today's global economy, the customer base has never been more diverse or demanding. And this diversity often means it's not well defined or that within an organization there are many views.
You may try to understand this base through metrics or statistics. While metrics are part of the answer, they can be abstract and not give the data you need to build an actionable plan for the content you deliver. For example, your organization may have customer satisfaction surveys. A customer satisfaction score may tell you how you rank relative to a competitor, but it doesn't give you the information you need to build better content or the content model to meet customer's needs. Building personas can help you move from this vague picture of your customers to something that is real and actionable.
Personas help you understand who your customer is—as a user and as a person. They go beyond a demographic description to include job responsibility, technical profile, their personal profile including what motivates them, their goals and anxieties.
One key piece of information is their problem solving methodology and their learning style. Content plays a key role in solving problems and in learning. So understanding how these differ from persona to persona is key in helping you personalize content and work to make your customers more successful on their job and with your product or service.
Another ingredient in the persona is the environment. Where do they work? We know that the value of content goes up if it can be delivered at the point of use. More and more your customers are mobile and need information delivered on mobile devices.
Scenario Development
Scenarios help you understand the work environment—think of the scenario as describing a day in the life. Scenarios show team interaction and are used to build what we call a work model. The work model includes interaction with information or content in much the same way you would describe interaction with a software system or device.
User scenarios are used to build the use cases that define system requirements. They are also a critical success factor in defining the information model. We hear a lot about delivering content at the right time and in the right form. User scenarios provide the data you need to meet that goal.
User scenarios are generally text; however, they can also be process flows or sequence charts.
Task Analysis
Task analysis is the analysis of how an activity or process is accomplished and includes the task frequency, task complexity, and other factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task. You can see how the task analysis and the scenario fit together.
Information from a task analysis can be used for many purposes, such as training or procedure design, for example checklists or decision support systems. Task analysis is also used in technical documentation where tasks are broken down into subtasks and individual steps.
Task analysis helps build your information model—not only for a single department but also cross functionally. Through a systematic analysis of the tasks you can determine opportunities to reuse and repurpose content as well as determine where you have content gaps.
If you are moving to DITA you will have strong emphasis on task analysis. DITA's three basic information types or specializations are Task, Concept, and Reference.