User Persona and Task Analysis

Dr. Narin Akrawi

The growth of global smartphone users over time from 2020 to 2025. As you can see, there has
been a consistent increase in the number of smartphone users worldwide, reaching 6.93 billion in
2024.
Human – Centered Design
 One Fundamental Premise in
Human – Centered Design
We all have biases, assumptions, and perspectives.
Naturally, we all tend to build products that fulfill our
own preferences, desires, and ways of thinking.

We are not our users.

We need to design for them not for ourselves.

There are methods and techniques in the beginning

of the design process to ensure we create products
tailor made for the specific needs and goals of our
users such as user persona and task analysis.
 We Need To Design For The Users
Not For Ourselves

“Here in silicon valley, we forget how skewed our population is,

and we should frequently remind ourselves how abnormal we
really are. The average person who uses a software - based
product around here isn't really very average.”

Alan Cooper
The Father of Visual Basic
Problem
We have lots of users!
How can we possibly design for every one of them?
If you design for everyone, you make no individual happy.

You can design for specific types of users.

 What Should We Know About Our Users?

Goals: What are the end objectives your users are trying to achieve? Knowing this allows us to align our design with their
desired outcomes.
Attitudes: This refers to the users' predispositions towards certain tasks, products, or technologies. Are they enthusiastic,
resistant, or indifferent? This affects how they will interact with your product.
Motivations: Why are users driven to achieve these goals? Is it to solve a problem, to gain a reward, or something else?
Understanding this can help us design features that cater to these motivations.
Mental Models: This is about how users perceive and understand the world around them, including your product. Do they
find it intuitive, or does it conflict with their pre-existing notions?
Relationships: Consider the social context of your users. How do they interact with others when using your product, and
how does your product fit into their social ecosystem?
Technology: What is the users' comfort level and proficiency with technology? Do they embrace new tech easily, or do
they prefer familiar interfaces?
Pain Points: These are the problems users encounter when trying to achieve their goals. Identifying and addressing these is
crucial for improving user satisfaction.
Environment: Where are users when they interact with your product? Are they in a busy, distracting environment, or a
quiet, controlled one? This affects how they use your product.
Processes: What steps do users take to accomplish tasks? Understanding this helps us streamline and improve those
processes within our design.

These insights are instrumental in creating a user persona.

User Persona
Persona

Each persona serves as a single

surrogate for many actual users,
which produces a clear target to
aim for.
Uses of Persona
communicating with stakeholders
defining and designing the product about your audience

building consensus and

rallying a team around a goal marketing the product

developing documentation prioritizing bug fixes

Uses of Persona
How To Create And Use
Personas
What's next
How Do We Identify Personas?
 The Plan: Phase 1
Setup
Clarify research goals, what you
determine project scope,
form a team want to learn to set the direction for
milestones, deliverables
you research

Leverage Existing Information

secondary domain external resources (people internal resources (people with skills,
research ( academic out of your organization such expertise and knowledge within your
papers, books, industry as consultant) organization)
reports etc.)

Prototyping
create Based on the refined persona
Initial validate and refine initial persona against develop a hypothesis about the
personas research and real – world information users need and how they interact
or use the product
 The Plan Phase 2

Primary Research

gather determine additional methods

participants contextual inquiry (interviews) (if needed)

Synthesis
identify map and cluster
identify clarify distinctions
behavioral participants into define goals
patterns and add detail
variables groups
 The Plan: Phase 3

Presentation and Use

continually socialize,
design individual create a persona introduce
utilize, and reference
personas set to compare personas
personas
 The Plan: All Phases

Setup

Leverage Existing Info

Prototyping

Primary Research

Synthesis

Presentation and Use

 Timing

How long will this process take?

Depends on many variables. This is difficult to determine
and requires more research to figure this aspect out.
Setup
1. Develop a team

Who will work together to create personas?

2. Determine Project Scope, milestones and deliverables

3. State Research Goals

What do you want to find out?

This will help you determine what methods to use to find answers to your
questions. Also beneficial is to determine how you will use the personas.

Ensure that personas don't just become an artifact, because the value is so not
in the artifact itself.
Leverage Existing Info
1. Domain Knowledge
Primary research quality goes up when you have already researched the subject
matter and domain before hand. This knowledge will help you ask insightful
questions later on.

2. Existing External sources

Talk to Stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts - Leverage the knowledge of
others who know more then you do. What are the possible external sources of
data relevant to your domain, company, or product? Are there institutions or other
companies that might have conducted research related to your domain?

3. Existing Internal Sources

Who are the subject-matter experts in your company? Who has the most contact
with existing customers? Your support organization, sales force, and account
representatives can be great sources of information about your users.
Prototyping
It’s recommend that you create provisional personas whether or not you plan to
collect first-hand data about your target users.

• Help you target your field research to validate (or contradict) current impressions of
who users are.

• Provide some practice with persona conception and gestation methods before you
need to create your “real” personas.

• Provisional personas are easy to create and help people understand why personas
are valuable

• Provisional personas can be the eye-opening catalyst that gets your team interested
in some real user research. When your assumptions are exposed, so are gaps in
your knowledge of your users. Ad hoc personas can lead your organization toward
more rigorous user-centered design (UCD) techniques.
Primary Research
1. Identify likely roles
From stakeholder and subject matter expert discussions, you should be able to
develop an educated guess of the roles people who will use the product.

2. Determine the base number of interviewees per role

If the product or service is in a highly specialized industry with narrowly defined
roles, assume you need a minimum of about four interviewees per role; this is
usually the minimum number to see a behavior pattern.

4. Multiply sample size for important factors

Next, you may need to increase the sample size based on other factors that you
expect to cause BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES.

5. Trim the sample and incorporate other factors

Time and cost may become prohibitive when numbers get large. For most
projects, the optimal sample size turns out to be the base number of people per
role (usually 4 or 8) multiplied by your top one or two factors.

6. Adjust for no shows and poor interviews

Primary Research
Synthesis
1. Divide interviewees by role, if appropriate
When the division between roles is very clear, its best to treat research
participants in each role as a separate group for the purpose of identifying
patterns. This is because large differences tend to obscure smaller differences.
Make sure to compare apples to apples, and not apples to oranges.

2. Identify behavioral and demographic variables

For each role, identify which aspects of BEHAVIOR and ATTITUDE seem to differ
across interviewees. Then add DEMOGRAPHIC information, as well as
ENVIRONMENTAL factors.

3. Map interviewees to variables

Place each interviewee relative to the others in each spectrum (and in the
appropriate multiple choice categories, if applicable).

4. Identify Patterns
Start by trying to find two or more people who frequently appear together across
multiple variables. After this, try explaining and/or rationalizing why these variables
are related – this will help strengthen the patterns you find.
Synthesis
5. Define Goals
Goals are an integral part of personas. The level of specificity of goals is known as
END GOALS: aims the persona could accomplish, at least in part, by using the
product or service. Its typical to have 1-3 goals per persona.

6. Clarify distinctions and add detail

Patterns and goals are just the beginning; to become a real persona, you still
need to add details about BEHAVIOR, ATTITUDES, ENVIRONMENT, and others
to make the personas effective tools for design and communication.

Every user persona should incorporate a ‘day in the life’ description of current
behaviors relevant to the problems you are trying to solve.

Don’t insert a bunch of fictitious details or needless fluff.

7. Fill in other persona types as needed

Using the methods described previously.
Presentation and Use
1. Develop the narrative and other communication
An effective description includes:
• Name
• Photo
• Narrative
- behaviors
- frustrations
- environment
- skills and capabilities
- feelings and attitudes
- relationships
- demographics
- goals

2. Help others understand the personas as a set

In addition to helping everyone understand the personas as individuals you should
develop ways to communicate about them as a set that represents a range of
behaviors and needs.
 Number of Interviews and Tasks
for the Capstone Project
For our capstone project, a reasonable approach would be to conduct
between 5 to 10 interviews.
This number allows for a manageable yet diverse set of perspectives to
inform the development of personas and task analysis.
For task identification, starting with 4-8 core tasks based on initial
insights and refining them through the interview findings is advised.
This ensures a focused yet comprehensive understanding of user needs
and behaviors within the project's scope and timeframe.
 What is a task analysis?

Task analysis is the process of learning about the users through observation or
interviews to understand in detail how they perform their tasks and
achieve their intended goals.

Task analysis also helps identify the tasks that your website or applications
support. This also helps in refining or redefining the website’s navigation or
search to determine the appropriate content scope.
Task - Decomposition

33
 The difference is ...

Goal - state of the system that a human wants to accomplish.

Task - activities required, used, or deemed necessary to achieve a goal.
Actions - steps required to complete the task. No cognitive processing.

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What Is The Purpose Of Task Analysis?

One of the purposes of doing a task analysis is to

provide actionable insights into user processes.
This can be directly applied in designing efficient user
flows that help avoid unnecessary work from the
users. Instead, it delegates the tasks to the
system.
 When to Perform a Task Analysis?

It is recommended that you conduct the task analysis

early in the design process, particularly before you begin
the design work.
This is important since task analysis supports several
aspects of the user-centered design process, such as the
following:
•Gathering of website or apps requirements
•Developing content strategy and site structure
•Wireframing and Prototyping
•Performing usability tests
Important Questions When Conducting A Task Analysis:

In "User and Task Analysis for Interface Design" by JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish, the authors
emphasize several key questions essential for conducting a task analysis effectively. These questions
help designers understand the users' perspective, goals, and the context in which they operate:

- What objectives are users aiming to fulfill?

- What steps do users take to accomplish these objectives?
- What are the personal, social, and cultural experiences users bring to these tasks?
- How does the physical environment affect users' task performance?
- In what ways do users' prior knowledge and experiences shape how they approach these tasks?
- How do users conceptualize their work?
- What sequence of actions do users follow to execute these tasks?

These inquiries are crucial for designing user-centric interfaces, offering a comprehensive
understanding of the user's journey, from their motivations to the execution of tasks within specific
contexts.
What Are The Different Approaches To Task Analysis Useful In
UX/UI Design?
1. Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA): This approach involves breaking down tasks into smaller, more manageable subtasks. For
example, in the design of an e-commerce app, the HTA would break down the task of purchasing an item into subtasks like
searching for the item, adding it to the cart, entering shipping information, choosing a payment method, and finally
confirming the purchase.

2. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA): CTA focuses on understanding the thought processes behind tasks. For instance, if a user is
working with a photo editing software, CTA might analyze the decision-making process behind choosing certain filters or
editing tools, considering factors like the user's perception of the photo, the intended mood, and the desired audience
reaction.

3. Goal-Directed Task Analysis: This analysis is concerned with the objectives of the users. Taking the example of a fitness app,
goal-directed task analysis would look at how the design helps users achieve their fitness goals, such as providing personalized
workout plans or tracking progress towards weight loss or muscle gain.

4. Contextual Inquiry: This involves observing users in their natural environment. For example, studying how medical staff
interact with an electronic health records system on a busy hospital floor can provide insights into how the system could be
optimized for quick, accurate data entry and retrieval in a high-pressure setting.

5. User Journey Mapping: This method charts the steps a user takes to complete a task, along with their emotional
experience. For example, mapping the journey of booking a flight online could reveal frustration at the number of steps
required to filter flight options or happiness at the ease of seeing available flights on preferred dates, suggesting areas for UX
improvement.
Hierarchical Task Analysis

Involves breaking a task down into subtasks

◦ Then sub-sub-tasks and so on.
Group these as plans which specify how the tasks might
be performed in practice
Start with a user goal
then identify main tasks for achieving it
 Textual Representation in Task Analysis:
Buying Shoes Online
Goal: Purchase a pair of summer shoes via an app.
Find Shoes
◦ Open app
◦ Navigate to shoe section
◦ Select shoes from category page

Add to Cart
◦ View product details
◦ Select size
◦ Add to cart

Checkout Process
◦ Visit cart
◦ Initiate checkout
◦ Login/register or guest checkout

Complete Purchase
◦ Input delivery and billing info
◦ Choose payment method
◦ Review and pay
Visual Representation in Task Analysis:
Aiding Taking Pills
By designing personas and crafting task analysis,
you can satisfy the needs of the thousands or
millions of potential users who have similar
characteristics and goals.
 Summary
Human-Centered Design is a dynamic and user-focused process that
integrates:

✓ research,
✓personas,
✓task analysis
✓, iterative design,
✓ and user feedback to create solutions that are not only functional but
resonate with and cater to the specific needs of the end-users.