You should understand your users.

There are several things you need to inquire somehow from your users. What were they doing in your article? What are they trying to get from your article? How can we help them along their journey for them to get to where they need? What makes a successful visit for them? Have they visited your competitors’ articles and preferred them to yours and what did they like about it? What features did they like in your article and what really annoyed them? We need to find out this information to write better contents for our users. Talk to your colleagues to find out the needs of your users. They should know your users. Talk to those people within the business who talk to your users. They might have a different perspective than yours but it’s still good to ask. Visiting a call center can help in understanding needs of your users . Listen to these peoples’ phone calls. Also listen to what people at the end of the phone are saying. If possible, talk to your users directly, although this is harder than the other methods. Book an appointment with them. Get their feedback and give them some incentives for coming along. Be creative in your methods of getting information from your users. Talking to your users might not be possible. They might be in another country or city and not physically accessible. Maybe in this case you can use the internet. Another tool that can be of use in as far as users’ needs are concerned is website analytic. These are the statistics of your website. It shows you data on visits to your article. It gives you number of visits to an article. The new visitors and returning visitors details give you the nature of traffic for the article. What devices are they are accessing your article? Online surveys can also be useful. You should not frame very many questions. Two or three questions are OK. Like; why did you come here? What did you like or dislike about the article? Did you like what you found? Were you happy with the experience? What should be done to improve on the article i.e what are the contents they are interested in? What is missing? That will influence the personas that were created.