User personas and their needs
We want to provide a website that has purpose and is easy to use by everybody. To achieve this, we continue to understand more about who uses this site and what they need from it.
Table of contents
Our research
Research undertaken includes:
- user research to find out who uses the website and what for
- usability testing to help inform our decisions about how we develop the website
Our approach to user research continues to be user focused and iterative. We will continue our user research and usability testing for the lifetime of this site.
If you have any further questions about our user research approach, or if you want to be involved in future user research sessions, please contact us.
Alternatively, if you have specific feedback about this website, please complete our feedback survey.
User personas
User personas are descriptions of typical users which represent people who’ll use your service.
We identified four main user personas:
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Concerned Citizen
“Tell me what the goals are and what is being done about them”
They use the website out of personal interest
-
Connected Influencer
“Give me a tool that will support my ambitions and give me a louder voice”
They use the website as it adds credibility to what they are doing
-
Fact Gatherer
“I just need to quickly see what progress is being made and check the facts”
They use the website because they need to check something
-
Involved Analyst
“I just want the data so I can do my own thing with it”
They use the website because they need to analyse the data
Visual data Raw data
The different user personas need different types of data on a scale from visual data to raw data in the following order: concerned citizen, connected influencer, fact gatherer, involved analyst.
Concerned citizen
Who they are
Someone who has an personal interest in SDGs or related topics but may also have a professional interest.
Likely to say
“Tell me what the goals are and what is being done about them.”
What motivates them
They have either a personal and/or political interest in the SDGS, and want to know what they are about and whether they will make a difference.
What they want
Concerned citizens want to:
- get a better understanding of the SDGs
- see how the UK is doing
- see how they can help
- see if the SDGs impact them
- see what is being done
Behaviours and preferences
Concerned citizens might arrive to the site from other public facing websites and are more likely to prefer SDG content from media outlets. They will often browse using handheld devices and may share links with others.
We must:
- explain the SDGs in simple terms
- give simple-to-understand context of what the goals mean
- give them an overall view of UK performance against targets
- explain what is being done to meet the targets
- use visualisations to explain everything
We must not:
- expect them to understand the data in the charts without any context
- use terminology and technical terms
- expect them to go into individual indicators to get a view of performance
- put lots of methodology and usage notes in their way
Connected influencer
Who they are
Someone non-statistical working in the not-for-profit space or for a private sector organisation looking to make money around sustainable development activities. Might be an individual attempting to challenge or guide on government policy.
Likely to say
“Give me a tool that will support my ambitions and give me a louder voice.”
What motivates them
Connected influencers understand the SDGs but don’t necessarily align to them. The SDGs provide a higher framework for them to align their work to.
What they want
Connected influencers want to:
- use the SDG website to educate people
- help businesses develop sustainability strategies
- take content from the website and report on it
- influence policies and change them
- drive change
- see how the UK and government are performing
Behaviours and preferences
They have a good knowledge of the SDGs and use the SDGs to champion the themes they work in. They use the website to begin conversations with others and use it in conjunction with the UN website amongst others.
We must:
- provide alternate routes into data so that their users can understand
- provide guidance on indicators that relate to the themes they work in
- ensure commentary and analysis are easy to find
- show relationships between different indicators
- show UK progress early in the journey
We must not:
- expect them to get their answers through data manipulation
- force them to approach each indicator separately
Fact gatherer
Who they are
Policy advisers in government departments who have been tasked with reporting on SDG progress and VNR, non-governmental organisations looking to understand what is going on in the UK and think tanks wanting to understand what the UK is doing and hold the government to account.
Likely to say
“I just need to quickly see what progress is being made and check the facts.”
What motivates them
They need somewhere that gives them a view of UK progress which doesn’t involve hunting through lots of data.
What they want
Fact gatherers want to:
- see what progress is being made and understand any issues or challenges
- take content and report on it
- see performance against targets and understand the issues and choices being made
- see progress towards collecting data and understand the issues and choices being made
- access the data and check the quality
Behaviours and preferences
They come to the website quite often and may copy data for use in reports, which report data around themes not goals and targets. They cite the website in reports and may mix data from other sources.
We must:
- provide them with a view of UK performance at every level
- provide bite-sized summaries to brief them on progress
- provide them with links to the physical source data
- show them targets early in the journey
- provide them with a quick view of what data has been collected, not collected and reasons why data was chosen or not collected
We must not:
- expect them to find the source data with a generic link
- populate the website with out-of-date information
- hide facts and figures under complex levels of navigation
Involved analyst
Who they are
Involved analysts can be a range of different people, who usually work with international data:
- A statistical audience working in or around the SDG framework
- Users creating detailed reports as part of commissioned project work
- Academia working in funded projects
- Students researching set topics
- Custodian agency analysts
Likely to say
“I just want the data so I can do my own thing with it.”
What motivates them
They need somewhere to get some or all of the SDG data so they can answer questions for themselves or others.
What they want
Involved analysts want to:
- get data to take away and use
- see trends behind the data
- find outliers in the data such as ‘leave no one behind’
- get all data or lots of data on given themes
- mix data from other countries or sources
Behaviours and preferences
They will often collaborate with others to produce analysis to inform or challenge policy and will share their reports with a wider audience. They will often copy the data directly from the tables rather than download it and will often transform the data for others.
We must:
- give them advanced routes into the data from the outset
- show them the targets
- show relationships between different indicators
- give them methodology behind the data
- tell them if the data is comparable with other SDG data
We must not:
- put lots of commentary and top-level visualisations in their way
- make it hard to get lots of data
- expect them to navigate each indicator to get the data they need
- expect them to understand the difference between data on the UK NRP and the UN global database