Personas

14 Feb 2006

Personas

Developed by Alan Cooper A user archetype used to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, and visual design

Who are the important users?

Always more than one group of users (if only beginner, intermediate, advanced)What technologies do they use?Essential to understand information needs of audience (and their vocabulary!) How else can you organize content so

that they can find what they are looking for?

Know your site visitors

ID audience segments, prioritize Use log files Consider privacy issues Personalization Cookies

Create personas based on research (ideal) or ad hoc (Norman)

Ideal Persona Development

Synthesized from a interviews with real people Summarized description includes behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes

Persona Descriptions

Personas represent behavior patterns, not job descriptions!It’s not a list of tasks, although the narrative that describes the flow will touch on tasks

Experience Goals

How the persona wants to feel when using a product Having fun and not feeling stupid are

experience goals

Usually there is one persona to represent those of us with a lot of anxiety about technology

From Perfecting Your Personas

End Goals

What happens when the persona uses the product? Create an award-winning publication Become more efficient with time Reduce accounting errors

False Goals

Save memoryEasy to learnProtect data integrityHow do these differ from End or Experience Goals?

Personas and Marketing

Your marketing and sales targets may not be your design targets Example: In-Flight Entertainment

System. Who is the better design target? The business traveler or the retired homemaker? Why?

Types of Personas: Olsen

Focal (primary)Secondary (satisfy when we can)Unimportant (low-priority)AffectedExclusionaryStakeholders

From Boxes and Arrows

Types of Personas: Cooper

Primary and secondary -- design for primary Cooper’s Premise: what would you get if you tried to design a car that everyone would want to drive? Tip: Focus on three or four goals that are specific to your product or service

Quotable

“Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master.”

Alan Cooper, 2003, http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters/2003_08/Origin_of_Personas.asp

Persona – Ellen

http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/c.noessel/mproj/p_ellen.htm

Ellen has just entered her senior year at Lincoln High School in St. Louis, Missouri. She enjoys speech and English class, hates trigonometry, and is active in the tennis club. Her parents both work full time. …

Persona – Robin

Robin is a product manager for an enterprise B2B vendor with a direct sales force. She manages all aspects of product management for three products. She is 35 years old with a college degree and some MBA classes. She earns $85,000 a year and is eligible for an $8,000 bonus based on…

http://www.productmarketing.com/magazine/1/4/0310sj.htm

Persona – Greg

The project's primary persona was Greg. His goals—being a great father and interesting date—drove the site's design. For someone active like Greg, the site's design needed to be accessible and quick to use. He isn't willing to dig more than a link or two into the site; either what he wants is on the first load of the home page or he goes somewhere else. Since he is a local guy, the site needed a large stockpile of constantly changing, local events information for both kids' activities and adult splurges. Greg isn't just a weekend tourist….

http://www.infotoday.com/online/jul03/head.shtml

Personas in Practice (1/3)

Help focus attention on a specific audienceHelp make assumptions about the target audience more specificHelp avoid the trap of building what users think they want rather than what they will actually use

Personas in Practice (2/3)

Help avoid the trap of building what developers think users wantProvide a benchmark for measurement (decision-making)Help prioritize ideas, features (decision-making)

Personas in Practice (3/3)

Personas are a medium for communication: once a set of personas is familiar to a team, a new finding can be easily communicated: “Alan cannot use the web site search tool” has more punch than “our usability testers had trouble with search”

From Microsoft, Personas: Practice and Theory

How Personas Work (1/2)

Power of narrative to engageHelp create scenarios that workBreathe life into task analyses

How Personas Work (/2)

Theory of Mind: 25 years of psychological research on how we can predict another person’s behavior based on understanding their mental state

Also from Personas: Practice and Theory

Conclusion

Personas are a design tool which enables the design team to communicate nuance and emotion, with the goal of creating a product that more closely meets target audience needs