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:

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:

  1. Concerned Citizen

    “Tell me what the goals are and what is being done about them”

    They use the website out of personal interest

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

Diagram of user personas on scale of data type needed from visual data to raw data in the following order: concerned citizen, connected influencer, fact gatherer, involved analyst.

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:

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:

We must not:

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:

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:

We must not:

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:

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:

We must not:

Involved analyst

Who they are

Involved analysts can be a range of different people, who usually work with international data:

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:

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:

We must not:

Back to top