Recommendations and Thinking about Personas

Our work with English 515 has been over for a semester, and time has evaporated since we received the final recommendation report from the Professional Writing students who researched, listened, and offered suggestions for the future of the Purdue OWL. Many of the recommendations made complete sense and confirmed ideas we were already considering: simplifying our overwhelming site map, redesigning our text-heavy resources without losing information, and promoting consistency with a revamped style guide for content developers.

Other suggestions, like thinking about global users through ethnographic research, provides an opportunity to take what has been anecdotal information and generate concrete data about the English language learners and teachers who use our site. The preliminary ethnographic research that Andrew began has shown us how we can take our global users into consideration.

The most innovative suggestion, at least to me, is the idea of generating personas for the OWL to help users navigate and find information. Users would identify with a persona based on user type and the action they were hoping to complete by visiting the OWL.  And it would create a more positive experience to reduce the overwhelming options we currently have on the OWL. Users could still go elsewhere on the site, but they would be directed to information most likely meeting their needs.

We had often discussed how best to direct users to where they wanted and needed to go. We had even discussed developing a heuristic that would guide users based on their felt needs or based on questions they were trying to answer. But we hadn’t considered personas—at least not in the way they were presented to us in the final recommendation report.

Now I know our Webmaster has some reservations about the term “personas,” which may mean something different from a web design standpoint. But I am still wrapping my mind around how radically different the OWL would be if we could redesign based on different types of users, leading to different spaces and experiences for users. Not just a menu that lists “suggested resources” for user groups that doesn’t alter the space or the experience in any significant way. We have a long way to go before implementing such changes, but I’m looking forward to thinking about the final recommendation report in the coming semesters and seeing what’s possible for the OWL.