Define your users workshop

When starting a new website projects it’s vital to know who we’re designing for and to consider their needs, context and history. On 13 January 2016, stakeholders from WorldSkills Abu Dhabi 2017 conducted a workshop with me - a UX consultant working on the discovery phase of the website project - to consider the wide range of people who will need to do things on the new WorldSkills Abu Dhabi 2017 website.

List our users who already know about WorldSkills

We started by defining the people or groups directly involved in or reached by the WSAD2017 website at the moment. We wrote each one on a Post-It note and put them on a big piece of paper. This list of all the possible users who already know about WorldSkills included:

• Competitors
• Experts
• WorldSkills members
• Journalists
• Policy makers
• Parents / family
• Sponsors

List our users who don’t already know about WorldSkills

Then we added the people or groups who might not know about WorldSkills but who we would like to reach. We wrote these users on a Post-It in a different colour. This list of all the possible users who don’t already know about WorldSkills included:

• Students (age ranges 7-11, 12-16, 17-21)
• Parents
• Policy makers - governments, think tanks
• Potential sponsors / partners
• Youth organisations / awarding bodies
• Training providers (who sell content)
• Teachers / educationalists
• Suppliers
• Volunteers
• Employers
• General public

Prioritising our users

Once we had each of these user groups on a Post-It we did an exercise to help us map them and determine which ones might be the most important for the new website. We created a matrix with relative importance on one axis and the user’s knowledge of WorldSkills on the other axis. Then we considered where each user group sat on this matrix.

The user groups in blue pen already know about WorldSkills, while the user groups in red pen don’t. This exercise provoked a lot of interesting discussion, but the surprising conclusion was that the relative importance of so many new user groups. Take a look at the final matrix:

Locating our users

We also did an exercise to consider where the different groups of users in the top left quadrant of the earlier matrix might be located: in the UAE, Mena/GCC or the rest of the world. Most of those user groups were inside the UAE.

Which user groups do we focus on?

For our final exercise, we brought back all the possible user groups and tried to pick a handful of the most important user groups to focus on during this website project. The list probably isn’t all that surprising but the exercise did highlight the importance of reaching new user groups who haven’t heard of WorldSkills. One of the challenges will be how we get people excited about the event who don’t already know about it and haven’t been before.   

At the end of the workshop we began to consider individuals who might be representative of each of these types of user and if they would be willing to be interviewed by me about WSAD 2017 as part of the discovery phase.