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Communicating with scientific users

Oana Stroe

EMBL-EBI Communications

stroe@ebi.ac.uk

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Know your audience
Tool: UX personas
Messaging
Channels
Case study: EMBL-EBI impact report

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Know your audience

What do they want to from you?
Understand needs and pain points
Qualitative and in-depth (interviews, focus groups)
‘Quick and dirty’ (polls, social media, exhibitions)

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Know your audience - UX personas

Name + image
Demographics
Needs and goals in relation to your ‘product’
Challenges, frustrations, pain points
“When I am … I want to … so I can …”

Use them!

A UX persona is a fictional character which represents your target users. Personas are an extremely valuable UX tool, allowing you to better understand your target audience and make design decisions accordingly.

We have used these to better understand our data resource and training users, private sector users and press.

Typically, a UX persona includes:

The persona’s name
An image (e.g. an illustration, avatar, photo or stock image)
Demographic information such as your persona’s age, gender, family/living situation, employment status and anything else that’s relevant to your product or problem space
Their needs and goals in relation to your product
A summary of their challenges, frustrations and pain points in relation to your product or problem space
Quotes from real users whom the persona should represent
Purpose statement:“When I am visiting the EMBL-EBI website, I want a powerful search that works across databases so I can easily find out everything about the protein I’m researching.”

Once you have the personas, use them and refine them.

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Messaging

Focus on benefits
Short and simple
Speak their language
Clear call to action

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Channels

Go to where they are
Word of mouth / recommendations
Your speakers at relevant events
Social media is fluid; can be hit and miss

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Case study: Impact report

Channels (in order of success):

Our scientists’ networks (toolkit)
Data resource websites
Email newsletters
EMBL-EBI social media
EMBL-EBI website (homepage)

Lessons learned

Social media - high effort, low reward
Local/regional champions