SharePoint has launched a revolution in the workplace. Thanks to its easy-to-use collaborative features all employees can now publish information about their projects, initiatives and skills onto the corporate intranet.  We hear stories of blogging CEOs; departmental wikis that allow everyone to post the solution to their problem; forums buzzing with activity. It’s like Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia all rolled into one. Oh, and don’t forget Google.

Sadly, reality in most companies doesn’t look like this. A typical SharePoint intranet is made up of many, many pages containing poor quality content. There’s an abundance of uploaded Office documents with filenames that tell you very little about the contents (do you really want to click on “pm_update.ppt” to find out what it’s about?). The countless forums you come across contain one or two obviously planted (and unanswered) posts from last year. Content that you do take the time to read is poorly laid out, badly written and boring. Images are either massive and take an age to download or they have been distorted and shrunk beyond recognition. Jo User is poorly served. Read on…

What is a user persona and why do we use them?

A persona is a detailed profile of a user – whether that person is a user for a website, an intranet, an animation or a widget. It turns them from being just “the user” into “Roger Moore, retired, 65 years old, partially-blind, challenged by new technology”: it puts a face on the target audience of the project you’re working on.

Personas are used across marketing. We use them to help us understand the audience of a project we’re working on. This is important because as digital media gurus with a high degree of familiarity with digital technology, we can become removed from the way the general public actually uses, navigates or searches. Similarly, our clients, who know their own product or service inside-out, can also forget that the general public has a different perspective. So personas are about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes – putting the user’s hat on, and asking the questions that they would ask. Would Roger Moore notice that button, and know to click on it?

Read on…