Needs-based persona project for National Literacy Trust

Client: The National Literacy Trust
Sector: Charity
Websites: Literacytrust.org.uk and Wordsforlife.org.uk
Services: User research, CRO (heuristics), Content, Analytics and data, Design

We delivered needs-based personas accompanied by research with immediate actions to help the National Literacy Trust understand its audience and improve user experience. We used a blend of research methods to uncover crucial insights about the National Literacy Trust’s audiences and the current digital experience.

Using our findings, we created a set of evidenced needs-based personas along with recommendations to improve the user experience immediately.

The National Literacy Trust aim to raise literacy levels across the UK, working with the most disadvantaged communities.

The organisation currently operates two websites:

1. literacytrust.org.uk - focuses on supporting educational settings
2. wordsforlife.org.uk - focuses on supporting parents and families

The team suspected that information and content were hard to find for users and that the two domains caused some potential confusion.

Their goal was to learn how their core audience groups interact with the websites to understand their needs better and establish if they satisfy them while seeking improvement opportunities, particularly around content and conversion.

While some original personas existed, there was a desire to validate and update these to build a consistent understanding of the National Literacy Trust's key audience groups.

The project brief was:

To conduct user experience research with The National Literacy Trust's primary audiences.

The findings from the research will be used to refine and develop new audience personas, as well as highlighting recommendations to improve user experience across the two websites.

We commenced the project with a stakeholder workshop using empathy and journey mapping exercises to capture stakeholder knowledge of their audiences and the current user experience.

To help us create the best possible outputs, we also took the opportunity to understand more about the charity and how they wanted to use personas in their work.

Armed with this knowledge, we began participant recruitment of six teachers (from a mix of educational settings) and six parents (across a range of demographics). In parallel, we analysed various heatmaps and web analytics quantitative datasets to understand the focus areas of our research across the two sites.

Across 12 one-hour sessions, we conducted audience interviews to learn more about their literacy needs. Then, we observed the participants undertaking tasks to understand how they interacted with the two websites.

Armed with our user needs and pain point findings, we conducted a heuristic review of both websites to identify areas of friction and opportunity.

Finally, we pulled all our research and analysis together to create our outputs:

1. An evidence-based report of user insights and prioritised UX recommendations. The findings included video clips from user interviews to illustrate user friction points, our recommendations for immediate UX changes, and further research.
2. A set of six key audience needs-based personas. Distilling all the research findings into user stories and various user attributes allowed us to develop a strong set of personas to help the National Literacy Trust team.