Lightning - Information personas

A talk by Nikita Efimov

Personas are a great way to share understanding about users and to become more empathic with your target audience. They help us to focus on people needs, problems and overall behavior.

But when we are talking about complex systems (from information architecture point of view) which contain a lot of information objects, users can change their behavior from time to time, navigating from one part of the system to another. People always seek for information: they look for something new or try to find what they’ve seen before, they formulate search queries and interact with search results or simply navigate via known (or unknown) paths. And each time their behavior may vary depending on different factors.

And “classic” personas don’t help us to deal with these behavior changes. During this talk I’m going to show my approach to describe people’s behavior based on different “seeking modes”. I call them “information personas” or “seeking personas”. They can be used as a replacement for “classic” personas or as additional helpers to create more robust information architecture.