I sketched out the initial personas in iteration 1.0 of the website:
- a hiring manager who isn’t sure how or why a PhD in religion would move to User Experience
- a team member who’s less interested in how I got here, and wants to know if I have experience with pivot tables
- a friend of a friend who’d heard I was moving into this field and wanted to see what I was up to
Redish recommends a deeper dive on these – really draw them completely, give them full personalities. But I’m not sure I can do that for this purpose; I don’t have a stable base of users that I can extrapolate from. On the other hand, I do have experience with the hiring process and some perspectives from persons currently in UX. So I can give these a bit more depth – namely:
– Most people prepping for an interview have little time and are distracted. They want to know quickly whether I have experience with X or Y.
– UX professionals will usually have a strong design background – so they’ll be evaluating this in terms of design as well as information (even though I’m a researcher)
– Unusual paths to UX are actually not unusual – so there’s less need to justify or dodge that question, and in fact it might be fun to bring my religious studies background to the forefront.
Other to-do:
– Run accessibility tests
-Revise the homepage; right now it’s not conversational.
– Inventory the site, especially in terms of consistent style.
Oddly enough, taking this time as an involuntary break means that I’m not hooked on the design anymore. It sometimes takes me an interval to stop focusing on all the reasons why I designed it like this, and start thinking about how to really redesign. That’s true in my writing, and it holds true here.
Readers and Texts 