Attitude, Aptitude, Ability: Using Web Personas to Improve Online Design

[Image courtesy of wafatariq]

Last week, the Election Academy co-hosted the latest of our regular series of “GeekNet” meetings with the Pew Center on the States in Minneapolis, MN. There were several excellent presentations that I’m planning to share with blog readers this week.

The first was by usability expert Dana Chisnell, who talked about how developing and using web “personas” – essentially personality types of users who can be expected to come to a web site – can assist web designers in creating an experience that meets users’ needs. Her full presentation can be found here.

Dana’s most important point came at the outset when she laid out the characteristics of four individuals and, using only those characteristics, asked attendees to guess the users’ ages. Almost uniformly, we weren’t successful – proving the point that age (and other demographic information) are essentially irrelevant when it comes to predicting how an individual will interact with technology. Rather, Dana suggests, we need to understand three key aspects of users’ online personalities:

• + Attitude – essentially, how persistent a user will be in seeking the information she needs;
• + Aptitude – online expertise (“tech-savviness”) that a user brings to the task; and
• + Ability – users’ physical and cognitive attributes that, if impaired – by advancing age or other life events – can affect how well a user can get what they need.

Dana’s doing a ton of fascinating work in the field – I’ll tell you more about it later this week – but for now it makes sense for you to consider attitude, aptitude and ability as you consider how to help voters navigate the election process in 2012 and beyond.