Leverage the user agenda to trigger customer engagement

Personas & scenarios Vs task analysis

In the early noughties, a few user experience gurus became proponents of developing personas and scenarios to drive website design.

Personas define clear images of target users including their lives and workplaces and scenarios describe user activities - what the user does or wants to do and how they go about their task.

Personas enabled engineers and usability specialists to humanise abstract audiences such as customers and online users, and, as a result, increase the usability of the product they were building.

The concepts appealed to user experience professionals AND business.

UX professionals liked personas because they were concrete and easy to present to clients.
Business liked personas because they fitted in well with customer segmentation and the type of data business collected in focus groups.

Why personas & scenarios fail

The great flaw with personas and scenarios is that they ignore the real online engagement trigger - the user agenda behind what the user has come to achieve.

It's not who the user is, but what they are trying to do

What matters if someone is attempting to pay a bill online?

Does it matter what type of car they have? how many children they have? Does it matter that they have a profession? Play golf once a week? Dine out often?

What matters is

what payment options they expect to be offered
what information they assume they will need to share with the pay bill application
what data they can glean from the bill
what they might not know and will need to be told
how long they expect the transaction to take
at what point they expect to have the opportunity to pull out
what confirmation they expect for success
what they assume success means in terms of time frame for bill payment

Most of the task agenda will be sub-conscious. Users don't think as they start the pay bill process that the task will take them less than a minute but when the task becomes ponderously slow, they KNOW that it is taking longer than they would expect.

A bill payment is now a standardised online process, and users are unsettled by a process variation, such as no opportunity to review data entered before submitting or no email confirming the transaction.

Servicing ANY user task online demands that the designer understand the priorities, expectations, assumptions and pushbacks that are typically associated with the task.

Designing to trigger engagement, means designing for the user agenda.

Even though not all attributes of the agenda will apply to all users, designers need to evaluate the impact of not addressing an attribute that analysis has uncovered.

Agenda is the customer 'baggage' associated with a task.
Agenda will be the same or similar irrespective of who the user is
Agenda determines user engagement with your site.

Good content and application design triggers engagement

Users engage with content and functionality, not with architectures and images. Good design means that content and functionality anticipate and support the user's task and the agenda set behind the task.

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