04/10/2023

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Jen McGinnPrincipal User Experience Engineer, Oracle

04/10/2023Jen McGinn

Introduction

Jen McGinn BS Information Systems, MS Human Factors

in Information Design UX career: Sun, SolidWorks, Nokia, Oracle UI Design & User research

Survey design and analysis Persona development Heuristic evaluation

Reviewer for CHI, UPA conference committee, reviewer for JUS, Boston UPA Board of Directors

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Agenda

Definitions Advice based on lessons learned from

my experience Persona development case studies

Ask questions!

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What are personas?

Personas are a product design tool: First “invented” by Alan Cooper, in 1999 A name for pretend users who represent

populations (hypothetical archetypes) Defined by their goals (goal-driven design),

which are motivations for behaviors 1- to 2-page descriptions Names and personal details Originally used to drive interface design

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Use Cases for Personas

Formative or summative? Yes :)

Where are you in the design lifecycle? Determines how the personas can be used

Validating a value proposition Mocking up prototypes Creating use cases for the technology Recruiting for usability testing

How much do you already know about your users? How well can you communicate that knowledge across

organizations and up and down the management chain?

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Traditional persona development process

Cooper (1999) “it is more important that a persona be precise

than accurate” Pruitt & Adlin (2006)

Identify important categories of users Process the [existing] data Identify & create skeletons Prioritize the skeletons Develop selected skeletons into personas Validate your personas

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More approaches

Goodwin ( Multiple papers) First to call for validation of personas

Mulder (2007) Uses lots of quantitative data as well as

qualitative data Cooper, Reimann, Cronin (2007)

“Personas are based on research” McGinn & Kotamraju (CHI 2008)

Large-scale survey first, followed by targeted interviews

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Getting started

Don't work in a vacuum Get all the stakeholders involved

What are the big questions that the business needs to answer?

Use your subject matter experts Not as a direct data source People who can provide background

Give a 20- to 30-minute talk to the team to define expectations What data will and won’t be gathered?

Ask about time and budget constraints

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How to get buy-in

Position the personas as a way to validate what they already know or challenge the conventional wisdom

Define terms and UCD concepts Compare & contrast what you do to 'x' Use what you know about the client organization

What do they value? What is their language? What is their history? What are they being goaled on?

Align your data gathering with their business needs

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Persona attributes

Generic Education, work experience, age, computer

proficiency, geography, relationship status, income, number of children, pets, etc.

Specific Germane to the problems that your organization is

to trying to solve Collaboration in distributed meetings Project and portfolio management Training and certification Cell phone and laptop users Caregivers and patients

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Persona attributes What attributes should you include?

(Signal)Attributes that are germane to the problems that your organization is to trying to solve Are you working for Petco? For Peapod? For Bank of America? For Dell?

What attributes should you omit? Everything else (Noise) Any attribute that is not germane to the

problems that your organization is trying to solve

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Kinds of questions

Demographic: Age, job role, education May be important for user segmentation Help to determine the value of the user group And subsequently, to determine their high-value tasks

User Research: Behavior, reporting prior experience What motivates you to take training? Who approves your training? How much have you spent on training in the last year?

Marketing: Opinions, preferences, future-focused How much will you spend on training this year?

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How many personas?

How do you know when you have enough? When you’re not learning anything new

Not enough? Test: Can you say one way or the other that the persona

would appreciate a given feature and why? Example: Developer, System Administrator, Manager

Too many? Test: Are there attributes that are repeated across

personas? Can you take what’s left and move it into another persona?

Example: College student, 23- to 28-year-old professional, 29- to 35-year-old professional

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Photos

Will they be used for internal only purposes? Where to find or get photos

Istockphoto.com or another royalty-free site Internal database of employees, Facebook Take them yourself Hire them out to an agency

Alternatives to photos Comics/drawings Action figures? (Cisco)

What would work best in your organization?

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Names

Alliteration Sally the sales sleuth, Jared the Java Developer

When in the process to give your personas names Too early: focus on wrong attribute Too late: no-one can remember the name

What attribute do you feature? What are you measuring? How is this persona differentiated from the others?

Specific behavior (sales sleuth, list maker) Demographic attribute (college student, retiree) Job tasks or roles (middleware administrator, doctor) Attitude or value (social connector v. seeks entertainment) Goals (attend a meeting v. host a meeting)

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Cisco, 2007http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1240905

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Validation

Is it necessary? Confidence & credibility

What are the various methods? Use a different kind and type of method than what you

used to initially develop the personas Build it into the persona development process Make sure you have data from one quantitative method

and one qualitative Examples:

Survey + phone interviews Brainstorming, focus groups, and surveys Ethnography (on-site interviews) and survey

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Reporting

PowerPoint As many diagrams as possible 20 to 90 minutes What do you cover?

Goals Development process Implementation details Findings Next steps

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How long will it take?

It depends :) How long do you have? What other constraints are on the problem? What is the scale of the research? Are these

personas for one product, or the whole company?

How many and which methods will you use? At least 2: One quantitative + one qualitative

Which activities need to be performed serially vs. what can be performed in parallel?

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How much will it cost?

Time – yours and your colleagues' Planning Recruiting Conducting research Analyzing data Developing personas Reporting out

“Materials”

Incentives Lab Survey vendor Translation Food & drinks

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UIE’s Attributes of Successful Personas

Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects http://www.uie.com/articles/successful_persona_projects/

1. Conduct First-hand Research

2. Include The Broader Team

3. Develop an Intimate Knowledge of Each Persona

4. Be Relevant to the Immediate Design Objectives

5. Provide Rich Scenarios for Each Persona

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Existing Product Case Study

Issue:Training organization needed to know more about who was taking training and getting professional certification; all of their data was anecdotal

Research Goal:Develop personas for the organization to provide a framework for understanding and organizing conflicting marketing data; use this new understanding to drive revenue growth in the coming fiscal year

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Method

1. Worked with the client team to determine important persona attributes

2. Created a survey to gather data that the organization needed on their customers

3. Invited customers to take the survey (1328 completes)

4. Used statistical factor analysis to create initial persona groupings

5. Followed up with (~30) targeted interviews6. Adjusted the groups as necessary7. Personas distilled the survey data & interviews into

meaningful chunks

Geographies Represented

Persona Family 1 Persona Family 2 Persona Family 3 Persona Family 4

Ha

rry

La

rry

Sa

m

Da

n

Mik

e

Ale

x

Jo

an

na

Ja

red

Te

rry

Ca

rly

Ma

nn

y

Americas 41% 49% 50% 38% 47% 59% 41% 43% 38% 43% 52%APAC 28% 19% 19% 35% 22% 22% 37% 31% 25% 29% 20%EMEA 31% 32% 32% 27% 31% 19% 23% 26% 37% 28% 28%

100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

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Jen McGinn 04/10/2023

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New Product Case Study

Issue:New product development team was designing for users that the company had never tried to sell to before. Initial personas had been brainstormed.

Research Goals:Validate the personasGet feedback on the value proposition from representatives of the persona groupsGet more data on what they used their cell phones and laptops for

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Method

Personas Brainstormed 7 distinct personas with the dev team Got management to narrow the research focus to 3

Recruited 8 – 10 participants for each of 3 focus groups

Each participant completed a lengthy survey detailing their cell phone and laptop habits

Desired outcomes: Persona validation/new information Feedback on value proposition & physical designs Determine which service to develop first

Technological proficiency

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Pre-session Questionnaire

2. Other than making and receiving calls, what do you use your cell phone for? Select all that apply.

 

___ Nothing else ___ Viewing email attachments

___ Web access ___ Editing documents

___ Listening to music ___ Personal Organizer / Calendar

___ Taking pictures ___ Check on my auctions

___ Viewing or editing photos ___ Alarm clock

___ Text messaging ___ Calculator

___ Video messaging ___ GPS / Mapping

___ Address book ___ Games

___ Taking notes ___ Shopping lists

___ Online Banking ___ Watching videos or TV shows

___ Email ___ Other ___________________

___ Social networking (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on)

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Pre-session Questionnaire

16. What do you most frequently use your computer for? Select up to ten answers.

 ___ Work or school work (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations)___ To-do lists___ Email and correspondence ___ Listening to the radio___ Watching TV___ Watching videos on the web___ Watching DVDs or downloaded movies___ Archiving or listening to my music collection___ Social networking (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on)___ Researching products, services, or companies___ Shopping (purchasing, not researching)___ Selling on eBay, Amazon, Craig’s list, or other site___ Instant messaging…... Too many more to list to be legible on the slide …

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Example of resulting findings

Top uses for cell phone other than making/receiving calls

• Text messaging (19 of 20)• Alarm clock (17 of 20)• Calculator (14 of 20)• Address book (12 of 20)• Taking pictures (12 of 20)• Personal organizer (10 of

20)

Most-frequently used applications on their computers:

• Email & correspondence (20)• Office productivity tools (18)• Mapping/directions (18)• Online banking (16)• Reading news sites, feeds, or blogs

(14)• Watching videos on the web (13)• Researching products & services

(13)• Shopping (purchasing) (13)

These were discrete sets

(in early 2007)

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Take-aways

Personas can be as effective or ineffective as any other research method

Personas should be aligned closely with the business goals of your stakeholders

Conduct original research to develop them Use multiple types of methods Find out what resonates with your

stakeholders (branding or Barbies?) Have fun

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Questions?

???

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References

Books The Inmates are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper

(1999) About Face 3, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and

David Cronin (2007) The Persona Lifecycle, by John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin

(2006). The User is Always Right, Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar

Papers Kim Goodwin's Articles on Cooper.com

http://www.cooper.com/insights/journal_of_design/articles/

04/10/2023

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Jen McGinnPrincipal User Experience Engineer, Oracle