I guess this one should be filed under “Duh”. The use of personas is pretty common while defining user interfaces and is a valuable tool in defining use cases, usage scenarios.
It is a very logical next step as you move from the what to build (through Customer Development) to the actual building (Product Development). The KissMetrics blog has a an interesting post today on how you can use Personas to define your SEO Keywords. When figuring out which keywords to optimize for (and bid), it is especially important to speak the “user’s tongue”. Use of the right terminology is not only important within your product, but it is even more important to get it right, to make sure you get your positioning right. Personas help refine the SEO key terms and I think are also a great way to figure out which segment works well and which ones don’t.
While I have used some of the underlying techniques here, I have never actively thought of extending personas in the context of SEO. Overall, a great read. Check out the the entire blog post at the KissMetrics blog at How User Personas Can Improve Your SEO Strategy
use. I was curious to see if Microsoft had pushed any envelope / come up with something cool in terms of user-interface (The Ribbon interface, anyone?), so like any good kid, I installed the app from the app store. I still haven’t gotten to use it and the sign up process turned out to have as many roadblocks as you can possibly imagine. In effect, it seems that the signup was a hurried afterthought, not at all designed for the mobile platform. There is no clear and frictionless path to signup, no sense of instant gratification for the user.
