Leveraging Personas To Enhance the Citizen Experience on Government Websites

Time: 
07/24/2015 - 13:00-07/24/2015 - 13:45
Room: 
Room G1/G2
Experience level: 
Beginner
Session Track: 

Front-end, User Experience and Design

This track covers delivering projects focused on the most important audience—the end user. Learn how to leverage Drupal to help you keep abreast of emerging trends in the mobile, componentized Web world. We’ll show you strategies for fostering collaboration between content creators, designers, strategists, and end-users.

Speaker(s): 

In the world of Web 1.0, it was considered a perk for a government agency to have a workable, public-facing website where citizens could access information or even potentially complete various tasks. As members of the Web 2.0 world, however, we no longer view real-time access to information as a perk but, rather, as a necessity.

Government websites have certainly begun to embrace technology in order to enhance transparency and customer service, but many websites have a long way to go as they work to bridge the gaps between government services and the people that need them. This can include anything from intuitive navigational paths that allow users to easily complete tasks to streamlined content that facilitates user understanding and surfaces the most relevant information. By taking a user-centered approach to building government websites, however, government agencies can truly begin to enhance the citizen experience. Persona development—or the creation of hypothetical yet realistic and detailed representations of individual users—is one of the most effective strategies for building websites that enhance the citizen experience, both through targeted and personalized content, as well as through more user-focused information architecture structures. This session will take a look at:

  • What are personas?
  • What value do personas bring to the website development process?
  • What qualitative and quantitative methods are used to lay the groundwork for personas?
  • What does the process of creating personas look like?
  • How can we effectively maintain personas in order to ensure that the citizen experience is upheld over the lifespan of a website?

This session will be presented by Karine Bailly, a senior strategist at CHIEF/Rock Creek Strategic Marketing who specialized in creating compelling and intuitive content strategies for both public and private sector client websites.