Users & Needs

ChatGPT Image Nov 10, 2025, 03_34_30 PM_

Introduction

Here, the focus is on understanding users, focusing on their needs, contexts, and the tasks they must complete to achieve their goals. Usability and UX work emphasizes the need to look beyond assumptions and instead gather rich, contextual data about how people interact with systems, information, and environments.

In my own UX and usability work, I have leveraged interviews, observations, and task analyses to perform needs analyses and to identify patterns in user behavior and pain points that may ultimately shape design requirements. By grounding these design decisions in real user contexts, each solution supports authentic workflows, reduces friction, and reflects users' thinking and behaviors.

Missouri Archives Website Redesign.

View the Personas

View the Scenarios

User-centered design teaches us that personas and scenarios are powerful tools for humanizing design requirements and helping teams anticipate how real people will use a system. For me, the use of personas and scenarios to understand users has proven to be one of the most beneficial approaches. Though I've used them in a number of projects, this example focuses on the Missouri State Archives redesign project for the Interaction Design course I took. To represent the variety of users of the Archives' CONTENTdm digital collections, my team and I developed three personas: Stephanie, Gracie, and James. These personas encompassed a range of motivations, abilities, and frustrations, thereby anchoring the redesign in authentic user needs.

We then created scenarios based on the personas, which illustrated how each persona would attempt to accomplish a specific task within the system. During these scenarios, we discovered significant navigation, search, accessibility, and content presentation problems. Stephanie's scenario, for instance, highlighted the difficulties that a dyslexic legal researcher might encounter when looking up Supreme Court cases. Gracie's scenario highlighted the difficulties students face when dealing with handwritten content and limited filters. It was evident from James's scenario that museum professionals needed more efficient tools when searching for information.

Through the combination of these personas and task-based scenarios, we were able to identify barriers in the existing design that shaped our redesign priorities. In this way, we clarified requirements, stressed accessibility, and ensured that our decisions supported the full range of the Archives’ users.

PATH: Practical Accessibility Training for Higher Ed

View Data Collection Instruments

It is important to consider usability and user experience when designing digital learning environments, since both access and educational outcomes are influenced by design decisions. In this section, I present user research conducted for my Instructional Systems Design (ISD) course project, Practical Accessibility Training for Higher Education (PATH). The objective of this project was to develop an online professional development program to assist university faculty in creating more accessible digital course materials. This example illustrates the ability to identify user needs, analyze contexts, and define tasks before design begins.

In order to collect data on faculty experiences with accessibility, my team and I used several complementary approaches:

Semi-structured interviews with faculty, instructional designers, and staff from the Disability Resource Center (DRC) and the Walker Center for Teaching and Learning (WCTL) to explore challenges, resources, and support needs.
Surveys for both faculty and accessibility experts to capture patterns of familiarity, confidence, and barriers to implementing accessibility practices.
Course content audits using Canvas Ally reports to quantify accessibility levels and identify common issues such as missing alt text, inaccessible PDFs, and low color contrast.

By combining these methods, we gained a multidimensional understanding of current accessibility practices.

Key insights included:

Faculty value accessibility but often feel underprepared to apply specific standards.
Automated tools like Ally are helpful but insufficient without clear guidance.
Time and perceived complexity are major barriers to consistent accessibility practices.
Faculty prefer concise, scenario-based training integrated into existing workflows.

These findings directly informed the PATH training design, which emphasizes microlearning, practical examples, and just-in-time support tailored to faculty needs.

Producing Written Work: A Hierarchical Task Analysis

View the HTA

Understanding users also encompasses developing an understanding of their goals for using a system or the tasks they need to complete within it. The example provided here comes from my Front-End Analysis of Systems course (Fall 2022), where I conducted a hierarchical task analysis (HTA) to gain a better understanding of a real instructional design challenge. I was working for an online learning company at the time. A consistent problem we faced involved students submitting low-quality written assignments, such as writing that read more like a text message than an assignment submission. The purpose of this analysis was, therefore, to identify the underlying cognitive and procedural skills students needed to produce a grammatically correct written response to determine where additional support or tools may assist students.

To complete the assignment, I:

Identified the major task: writing a grammatically correct response to a prompt.
Broke the task into prerequisite subtasks, such as evaluating grammar, spelling, word choice, and sentence structure.
Identified each subtask's Bloom's taxonomy level, from foundational skills (e.g., remembering basic grammar rules) to higher-order thinking (e.g., evaluating and revising writing).

This analysis revealed that a seemingly simple writing task actually involves a hierarchy of interrelated skills, from recalling grammatical conventions to evaluating tone, syntax, and structure. This HTA served to help facilitate the submission of higher-quality work by students. Student support staff were able to point students directly to tools within the system, such as spell checking, grammar checking, and mini-lessons focused on structuring written work, to strengthen the specific skills required for producing higher-quality submissions.

This work reinforced the importance of task analysis in clarifying usability challenges in learning environments, thus facilitating the alignment of support materials with the actual cognitive demands of learners. Additionally, it demonstrated the benefits of linking usability analysis with educational taxonomies in order to make sure that design interventions address not only the actions but also the thought processes of the users.