It feels like an eternity since my last post - the combination of school holidays, household chores / renovating, a real-life job and my desire to do well at Fantasy Football consuming every waking (and sleeping) hour.

_{👇 Source + Photoshop}

Real-life Job

In my last post, I shared the good news that I've taken on a new project which I've been trying to fit around everything else. Finding time to do 1 day (7 hours) of work across a week sounds easy, and that's what I thought too. The reality has been very different.

From the moment I wake up in the morning, the 2 little gorillas are demanding of my time. They haven't learned how to play-nice yet so leaving them to play for an hour is a far-off dream. So much so, I've come to the conclusion that there's something in my office chair (or my arse) which triggers activity in their brains causing them to scream incessantly at each other. I read that scientists had discovered a fifth force of nature which I believe to be related to this inexplicable activity.

_{👇 Source}

This post isn't about the joys or parenting though. It's about the work that I've been able to squeeze in...

User Personas

In my last post, I wrote:

I'm excited about the stages prior to that in researching and creating a good site structure and Information Architecture. Initially, by working on their customer segments and creating some Personas.

And this is what I've been doing.

I'm not an expert within my client's industry that I'm now working in so I sent a research spreadsheet to my client for them to provide more information about their customer base. This company's turnover is approaching £2m so I expected plenty of information for me to consume and dissect.

My spreadsheet came back with 6 rows of data - one of which was the example that I included as a placeholder.

Rather than going back to them with a request to "Try Harder", I scoured every article of their blog for additional information about their clients and their needs. On their blog, they had plenty of examples of work they'd done for their various clients - often containing the keywords that I was looking for. Can you guess how many of these clients were included in their spreadsheet?....














...

😡

So I pretty much ignored the spreadsheet and created the first persona based upon content from their blog. I sent this off last week and fortunately, it hit the right note and all they wanted was to change the name.

So today's a designated work day and having worked with very little on the first persona, I've got even less to work with on the second.

ChatGPT

One thing that I almost forgot to mention is the role that ChatGPT has played in my work. Whilst I was able to successfully create bullet points of users' needs, I struggled to generate the waffle surrounding it and if waffle's what you want, ChatGPT's the master.

I was also able to validate the work that I'd done with it... it's been such a long time since I've done this kind of work, having ChatGPT confirm what I'd planned to include and help me to rewrite it was incredibly helpful. Yes, ChatGPT added a huge quantity of superfluous bull shit but with a few additional prompts, we got to an outcome that I'm happy with.

ChatGPT was also able to help kick me off with the second persona, giving me similar companies to research from a single prompt. This has allowed me to generate a second persona that I'm reasonably happy with and the fact that I've stopped work to write a post on Steemit is a good indication of how much time it's saved me.

So this is where I'll sign off for today. Once these personas are complete, I'll continue to do some competitor research and then the next stage will be to start designing some user journeys and the site's information architecture... all much easier with the foundation of personas.