Personas
Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers.
Skills
There’s no reason why your personas can’t be created remotely, you can organize your interviews by Skype and work with your team in the same way.
Tools
- Google Docs
- Personapp
Allows you to create and share quick, lightweight personas using a simple framework. - Xtensio
This user persona creator helps you come up with your ideal user types.
Scenarios
A User scenario is a detailed description of what users do with the product and more importantly why they do it, outlining the motivation and the main goal of the user for visiting your website or using your product.
Skills
You may need to validate some of the tasks in your story with the users who contributed to your research, but that can do it by phone/email.
Tools
- Google Docs
Mental Models
Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, the user’s reasons for doing things.
A mental model is based on belief, it’s a model of what users know (or think they know) about a system such as your website. Individual users each have their own mental model.
Skills
As with personas and scenarios, a mental model is a document, and it relies on informed research. If you’ve got the data you need there are no problems working remotely.
Tools
- Google Docs
- Microsoft Excel
- Any Visual software (Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch)
Experience Maps
An experience map is an extended version of the Mental Model. Rather than looking at one subset of time for a single user, an experience map is a holistic, visual representation of your users’ interactions. Basically a visual representation that illustrate users’ flow, what they needs, what they wants, the expectations and the overall experience for a particular goal.
Skills
If you’ve got the data you need, you don’t need to be sitting on-site to create this kind of documents.
Tools
- Any Visual software (Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch)