Similarities Between UX and Social Media

Lately I’ve been doing a bit of light reading on User Experience (UX). Now that I’ve finished the Harry Potter series for the umpteenth time, I’ve immersed myself in books like Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience (Second Edition) and Leah Buley’s ebook The User Experience Team of One. These books discuss the importance of understanding your users and having their needs at the forefront of every stage of a design process.

As I’ve discussed before, I’m not a developer nor am I a UX designer. I’m a content person. I'm a researcher. I’m a customer service person. I just run a few social media channels. What can I offer to our development team?

It turns out, a whole heck of a lot.

I have direct contact with our users. I am the only person who interacts daily with our audience — the constituents of Georgia. As this revelation burst through my brain, I realized not only can I help our developers and UX designers make our websites more useful, but I can also apply all these UX principles to my content strategy.

Just like with UX design, it’s pertinent for me to understand the Georgia.gov followers and keep their needs at the forefront of every stage of the social media process.

Duh Bethany.

It sounds so obvious. Why did it take me this long to connect the dots? We’ve been preaching users first for ages, why shouldn’t I apply the same techniques to our social media?

Creating a Persona

Buley explains 5 research methods you could use to help understand your users.

1. Guerilla User Research
2. Proto-Personas
3. Heuristic Markup
4. Comparative Assessment
5. Content Patterns

Buley says that these 5 methods can help us learn what our users need, want, and experience. Reading through everything, I decided the Proto-Personas would be best for my research for Georgia.gov.

The foundation of a lot of UX literature focuses on creating a persona for your users. Garrett defines persona as “a fictional character constructed to represent the needs of a whole range of real users.” It may sound silly, but trust me, this exercise works like magic. Instead of looking at an excel sheet of numbers, you're actually putting a human face to your data.

You may come across people who think the persona tool is overused and unhelpful. For me personally, I like creating personas because it forces me to put myself in my users shoes. This exercise helps me develop empathy for my users.

To create a persona, first you must do some research. If I were just handed a persona that someone else created, I may not find it super helpful. However, when I am the one who spends the time and energy researching these people, it forces me to get my hands dirty. I'm able to understand better who they are. I become familiar with the data and kind of develop a closer "relationship" with our users.

Once you’ve done the research and collected the data, then you can put a face and a name to help keep a “real person” at the forefront of your content creation.

Proto-Persona

The great thing about Buley’s explanations is that she focuses on being a team of one. She helps give a few tricks and tips for discovering your users when you’re by yourself without a ton of resources at your fingertips. Creating a full persona takes a lot of time and many, many resources. However, the Proto-Persona can easily be done by one person without sucking up too much time. Even though we're not creating a full persona, Buley explains that this technique still helps provoke empathy and customer-oriented thinking.

So, I got started.

I drew pictures of some pretend people, writing their demographics and interests. I listed their motivations, behaviors, and needs. I retrieved much of this data from our Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. I also looked at some of the Google Analytics for Georgia.gov. Facebook, Twitter, and Google give pretty detailed information about who follows you. If you thought the NSA collected a lot of data, just thumb through some of this and have your mind blown.

After I got some generic data, I then looked up some quotes our followers on Facebook and Twitter actually wrote. I wanted to capture not only their personalities but also their sentence structures, grammar, and humor.

Using all this data, a piece of computer paper and a few magic markers, I had a proto-persona. I did this a couple of times with a few different “people.” Then I taped them around my computer.

Going through the process of creating these proto-personas — immersing myself in their worlds and forcing myself to think like them — I discovered some insight on how to compose content my audience wants to see. By taping the pictures around my computer, I’m surrounded by them and can almost feel their presence while composing a Facebook status or tweet. I’ve even discovered interests I had overlooked. Who knew so many of our followers were animal lovers?

Many UX research techniques and principles easily translate to social media. Whether you’re working on a website or running a Facebook page, the bottom line is: Keep your user/audience’s needs first.

Related to: 

• Social Media
• Usability