About Us - News
WUP wins Environment Agency Personas contract
WUP has recently been awarded a contract by the Environment Agency to do some further work on developing the personas they use for their intranet and internet sites.
In 2006 WUP developed a range of personas for the Environment Agency. These won an Intranet Innovation Award for “supporting the delivery of better intranet content and functionality” and bringing together information that “lacked focus and coherence”.
The Environment Agency wanted to do additional work to gain greater insight and understanding the goals, motivations and contexts of two of the personas – one for the intranet and one for the internet. We proposed a range of research approaches to address these issues including two less usual methodologies: contextual inquiry and an online user research forum.
The contextual inquiry allows an exploration of the work environment and contexts of participants using ethnographic techniques to understand the more ‘tacit’ aspects of an individual’s work place and behaviours; this will be combined with depth interviewing/participative research techniques to establish user needs and attitudes to the sites, and explore possible solutions to perceived problems.
The online user research forum enables participants to become part of a closed, invitation-only group of users who interact with each other. This allows us to gain greater insight into their needs and give greater ‘reach’ than more traditional approaches, and can address small, discrete issues on an iterative basis.
This project is due for completion during the summer of 2008.