Project Overview

In 2009, the University of Washington Libraries developed User Personas to represent UW Libraries patrons.

While ongoing assessment efforts within the Libraries and University capture a great deal of data about patrons, it's not always clear how such data can be used to make specific design decisions.

The UW Libraries serves a broad and diverse population spanning many different disciplines and levels of expertise. Despite the individual differences between patrons, many share certain fundamental traits, needs, and goals. While we can't build a website for each individual library user, we can design for a few representative personas who embody these essential characteristics.

The UW Libraries Public Web Operations Group hoped to make better use of existing knowledge about patrons by creating personas that articulate this information in a concrete and accessible format, and help stakeholders with different perspectives develop a common understanding of the Libraries' priorities.

View the poster (pdf)

Assumptions Workshop

The project began with a staff workshop aimed at gathering assumptions about patrons. All UW Libraries staff were invited to this workshop, and about 30 participants attended, including representatives from various branches and all three UW campuses. Using butcher paper and post-it notes, workshop participants contributed patron characteristics, goals, and needs based on their personal experiences in the Libraries. The workshop products were also posted in the staff lounge for the following week, and on the staff intranet to provide access to those who weren't able to attend.

Validating with Research

The assumptions generated by staff were then validated against published research findings about library patrons. A wide range of sources were consulted, including assessment surveys conducted by the UW Libraries, ethnographic research conducted at other academic libraries, national research projects focused on information literacy among college students, persona projects at other academic libraries, and usability studies of library websites. All of these research sources were evaluated based on the similarity of their population sample, and were used to identify key elements of the assumptions workshop content that accurately represent Libraries' patrons.

A detailed breakdown of the assumptions generated during the workshop and the related research findings are available by visiting the tabs above, or by using these links:

Undergraduate | Graduate | Faculty | Other Groups

The validated user characteristics were then analyzed to determine which characteristics could be grouped around unique goals to form the basis of personas. Skeleton personas were developed which outlined the goals, needs, tasks, and pain points of each persona.

Research Analysis

Several dimensions stood out as critical to understanding different types of Libraries patrons:

Discipline

Academic disciplines at the UW fall into 5 major groups:

Humanities/Social Sciences/Arts
Professional
Health Sciences
Natural Science
Engineering

Since Health Sciences users are currently the primary audience for a separate Libraries website, the personas developed in this project focused on the other four discipline groups. Many different research projects have confirmed significant differences in library use between patrons working in the natural sciences, who focus primarily on journals, and Humanities/Social Science patrons, who make use of both journals and other library materials.

Technology Use

According to the most recent user research conducted by the UW's Learning and Scholarly Technologies Group, a few technologies—email, course or project Web pages, and Word-processing software— are broadly used across all sets of users. Several other technologies—wikis, blogs, videoconferencing, RSS readers, et cetera—were used considerably less.

Frequency of Use

For each of the potential patron groups, we considered the frequency with which we can expect that type of person to use the Libraries website. In an ideal world, the libraries website could be both simple enough for infrequent users to understand easily, and still filled with rich resources that are easy for experienced researchers to access.

These two contradictory goals must somehow be brought into balance with the following assumptions:

Experienced researchers are somewhat familiar with library terminology and have some sense of what resources exist (e.g., catalog, databases, journals)
Infrequent users will likely always have difficulty navigating the site
Novice students who are just beginning their academic careers but can expect to become regular library users are both a numerous group and have much to gain from design elements that match their expectations and guide them to appropriate resources

Deriving Persona Goals

Based on an analysis of the workshop outcome and validation research, a set of fundamental goals was derived.
Each of these goals formed the core of a distinct patron persona:

Persona Descriptions

Based on the goals analysis, skeleton personas were developed, then fleshed out with details and images to add realism. These details were validated by briefly interviewing users who fit the persona profile. One young faculty member, one former doctoral student, and an MBA student assisted with providing realistic individual habits and details. Visit the tabs at the top of this page to see full details about the research supporting each persona.

Click one of the images below to see the full persona description (pdf format).