Featured in Designing for Emotion

October 18, 2011 by zakiwarfel
2

We just received our copy of Aarron Walter’s Designing for Emotion and are pleased to have our persona model featured in the chapter on Personality on page 34.

Persona

Aarron contacted me in 2010 about the book he was writing for A Book Apart and said he was doing a chapter on personas. He was kind enough to tell me that our model was one of the best and most useful he had ever seen. What he didn’t know was that at the time, we were actually redesigning our persona model. Fortunately, his deadline allowed us to get him an early version of the updated model, which is the one featured in the book.

Aarron and I had a conversation over Skype to discuss our persona model and the process behind crafting the story and visualizations we call the persona DNA. While we collect data from several resources for our personas, as Aarron points out in his book, probably one of the most important resources is using someone we know as one of the data points.

We’re huge advocates for data-driven personas and you can see the impact they have on our work.

We’ll be posting something in the near future on the process behind creating our persona model.

posted October 18, 2011 by zakiwarfel filed under Design 2 comments so far, view or leave a comment
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REFRAMER-A New Tool To Analyze Data

September 28, 2011 by Judy
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Since I’ve been at MESSAGEFIRST I have had the opportunity to work on various projects that involved user research, customer interviews and usability testing.

In the Fall of last year we started developing an application, that we call Reframer, to help us sort through the unstructured data we were capturing from these sessions. It’s been quite a process, as it can be when developing any product from scratch, but here are a few things I noted on the “old ways” of how we did things and how we are moving forward.

Old Research Method

  • Noting observations in a spreadsheet
  • Multiple observers with their own spreadsheet which leads us to combine all the data into one main spreadsheet
  • If not combined we had difficulty analyzing data from all observers with the multiple spreadsheets
  • When combined it was not possible to update or edit the same spreadsheet with multiple users at the same time…unless we transferred everything into Google Docs which we have done.
  • Tagging was fairly easy but no way to see relationships right away

Overall thought: Working in spreadsheets was not ideal, but it gets the job done.

New Research Method through Reframer

  • Noting observations, descriptors (tags), judgements, concepts and ratings in a web app
  • Being able to view observations from multiple users in one space for all your sessions or participants
  • Ability to see relationships with your data as observations are tagged
  • Being a step closer to setting up a controlled vocabulary and a library of potential descriptors
  • Prioritizing our concepts based on our rating of importance
  • Being able to be out of the office and jump into Reframer and see observations for a study that is currently in progress

Overall thought: I feel I can view my data in a different way that seems a little clearer. It helps me learn how to note observations in a smarter way to help automate the analysis process.

I  like to remind myself that this new application is in beta version. My imagination wants to have all the features and functionality built in overnight… and I have to come to terms with remembering that is not possible:-). Besides there is really no end to improving a product.

Anyone out there doing research should take a look at this app. Tell me, does it make it easier? How is your research style the same or how does it differ? If you haven’t done so already , sign up, play around and share your ideas.

Watch a video demo

Register at reframerapp.com

posted September 28, 2011 by Judy filed under Research, Tools 0 comments so far, view or leave a comment
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Responsive Redesign Unleashed

September 28, 2011 by zakiwarfel
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We’re always looking for opportunities to try out something new. Since our case studies needed updating, we decided to take the opportunity to update our site with a responsive/adaptive design.

Initially, we started out building it to scale down for tablet and mobile devices. However, about half way through, we decided to shift gears and start with mobile first. Taking on mobile first gave us a different perspective on the design.

  • It really challenged us to think of this more in terms of information design
  • It encouraged us to think of DOM structure first, leaving the old model of designing with boxes and arrows behind
  • It helped us write less code than going from desktop down to mobile
The redesign wasn’t without issues. We wanted to use a carousel on the home page to showcase some of our recent work, but finding a responsive carousel proved to be almost impossible. We did come across two and settled on Flexslider, which we had to customize.
One caveat, IE7-8 visitors get the mobile version of the site served up regardless of their browser window size. Unfortunately, IE pre-9 doesn’t do media queries. We tried using respond.js, which is suppose to fix that, but it keeps crashing IE. Honestly, we’re okay with IE7-8 users getting served the mobile version. It’s still fully functional.

It was a really interesting and fun challenge and the results are in the following video.

PS. In the process of building our site, I wrote a responsive grid system that handles one column, two column, three column, four column and five column layouts with just 13 lines of CSS. It’s entirely flexible and can be set to fully fluid or fixed fluid and centered. It’s entirely based on ems and % for measurement. And yes, we’ll be releasing it publicly as a responsive HTML5/CSS3 framework pretty soon.

If the video doesn’t show up for you, you can watch it on Vimeo.

posted September 28, 2011 by zakiwarfel filed under Design 0 comments so far, view or leave a comment
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One Comment

  1. #1
    lhelwig said,

    Just read Walter’s lovely little book. Looking forward to reading about your persona process.

One Trackback

  1. Using Personas To Help Create Better Web Sites | 8 Gram Gorilla wrote:
    December 14, 2011 at 6:37 pm

    [...] simply copied from the greats out there and tweaked the material they are already using. Message First utilise an amazing persona model which we ripped off for our own use (although ours is far less sophisticated), Aaron [...]

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