Imaginary users can save your Drupal site

J-P Stacey & Rich Middleditch26. aug 14:45Acquia

http://cph2010.drupal.org/node/9178

Someone has an idea

Standard procedure?

Standard procedure?

Standard procedure?

Imaginary users or “personas”

Personas are not about brainstorming.

But on your Drupal site they'll end up with minds of their own.

Each team memberis focussed on the

bottom line.

Everyone's idea ofthe bottom line is

different.

“On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival.”

— Jakob Nielsen

Why this solution?

Personas in five steps

Name: Dominic Thomson

DOB: 16 January 1964 1957?

Address:          ?

Five step plan?

1. Acceptance

2. Find the users

Elastic user!

3. Find the patterns

Primary and secondary personas

PRIMARYPERSONA

PRIMARYPERSONA

SECONDARYPERSONA

SECONDARYPERSONA

The space of all functional requirements

4. Build the personas

Name: Dominic ThomsonPosition: Assembly Engineer

DOB: 16/01/1957Gender: Male

Address: 9 Southill, Charlbury, OX7 3EW, UK

FLY Aerospace

Building a useful persona

I'm motivated by...I want to be able to...

This is annoying...

5. Use the personas!

How can you use personas?

Help writing specifications Conflict resolution

Willing testerExtra team member

1. Help writing specifications

“Use standard form fields.

People prefer page elements that they recognise.”

“Don't have dropdown menus.

People don't like them covering up content.”

“We know there are some people out there who hate the things we love... but not sensible people.”

— Steve Krug

2. Conflict resolution

3. Extra team member

4. Willing tester

What do we want them to do?

Load /attendees

Assert some attendees on page

Type “stacey” in the “name” textfieldClick “apply”

and wait

Assert text exists“J-P Stacey”

What do we want to find out?

METRIC

WHAT

UXHOW

“Nobody knows you're a dog”

Email address

Blocked user

Persona role

Username

(Password)

Preparing personas for testing

Live personas are blocked their passwords are all ultra-secure

and they have non-existent email addresses

Your staging personas must be unblockedtheir passwords should be memorable

and all emails sent to you

http://github.com/jpstacey/Drupal­UserUnblock

Quick persona prep

Recording and replaying

Dominic performs a test

DEMO

Quick versus slow testing

QUICK SLOW

WHAT HOW

Personas everywhere

“As a normal user I would like to see a list of the content I've recently flagged when I log in so that I can revisit content I find interesting”

Scenario(s) for doneLog in; flag an item of content; log out and in again; check that the item is on profile page

Persona-driven specification

“As Dominic Thomson I would like to see a list of the content I've recently flagged when I log in so that I can revisit content I find interesting”

Scenario(s) for doneDominic Thomson logs in; flags an item of content; logs out and in again; sees that item on his profile page

Don't be afraid of new personas

Report bugs with Selenium

Test-driven development

Clientrequests

functionality

Recordtest as

personaTest fails

Buildfunctionality

Testsucceeds

Clientsignoff &deploy

Most or all of team agrees: success = done

Personas & continuous testing

The persona laptop

Personas & continuous integration

The Selenium RC Server

We're now using personas!

Help writing specifications Conflict resolution

Willing testerExtra team member

Back to that idea

Thank you, Dominic!

Hey, no problem!

And thank you!

Creative Commons attributions from Flickr Bulb: Tim Cummins; List: jcrawf3; Portrait: adubber; Notepad: calsidyrose; Desk: keithius; Tesla coil: willivolt; Hand: Damon Duncan; Penguins: nouqraz; Team: atomicshed; Buttons: spikenzie; Pepperpot: hien_it; Elastic dog: quirkyrocket … icon fonts by somerandomdude

http://www.torchbox.com

@torchbox

@jpstacey | @middric

http://cph2010.drupal.org/node/9178

Any questions?