Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 12. User Needs and Preferences with the Attribute Grid

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User Needs and Preferences with the Attribute Grid

As a road builder, how do you know when to optimize for the miller and his son, their donkey, or belittling passersby? Teams learn and assume so much information about their users, it’s difficult to understand what information is important and use that information to make decisions. The attribute grid helps teams analyze user insights and understand what matters most. Your team will focus on the contexts and preferences that matter, and you’re going to help them do it.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how an attribute grid lets you corral and understand everything teams know about a set of users, so you can make better product decisions. When teams analyze user contexts and preferences with an attribute grid, they can improve usability and efficiency and reduce errors, and products that cater to user preferences have better conversions and higher engagement. To achieve these gains, you don’t need to know everything about your users, just what matters.

Most important, unlike the traditional persona, an attribute grid can grow and evolve as the team learns more about their users over time.

How the Attribute Grid Works

Turning a stack of user research into one-page personas looks like magic. It’s actually a straightforward, step-by-step process:

1. Capture insights and observations
2. Group, analyze, and refine the data
3. Identify primary and secondary users

The attribute ...