Personas

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http//video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_storycaed76f16c61
32710db58210df3940afb8a3f7c8
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Personas

• Establishment of empathy and understanding of the
  individuals who use the product.

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Inmates Are Running the Asylum

• Alan Cooper,1998
• introduced the use of personas as a practical
  interaction design tool.

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• As I walked, I would engage myself in a
  dialogue, play-acting a project manager, loosely
  based on Kathy, requesting functions and behavior
  from my program.
• I often found myself deep in those dialogues,
  speaking aloud, and gesturing with my arms.
• I found that this play-acting technique was
  remarkably effective for cutting through complex
  design questions of functionality and
  interaction, allowing me to clearly see what was
  necessary and unnecessary .

Alan Cooper
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Developing Personas

• Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped
  in an instant but can take months or years to
  master.
• Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of
  study and months of practice before we consider
  them to be capable of creating and using personas
  at a professional level.

Alan Cooper
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Why Personas?

• Provides focus for the design
• Talk about Lori not the user
• Humanizes the design
• Remarkably effective for bringing user-centered
  design into an organization

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Archetypes, not Stereotypes

• Archetypes representative of actual groups of
  users and their needs
• Not based on individual people
• Not reflective of every customer or marketing
  segment

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Ideally Based On Research

• based on qualitative user research observational
  studies, contextual inquiry, interviews, etc.
• Personas are specific with details that make them
  real names, families, pet peeves, homes, jobs,
  type of computer used, goals, tasks, needs, etc

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Personas Represent Behavior Patterns, Not Job
Descriptions

• In some cases there will be multiple personas
  with the same job description
• In others, a single persona can represent people
  with a wide range of jobs.

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Personas Are Not

• Demographic ranges
• 18-34 year old college educated females making
  50K
• But you might use the demographic information as
  a basis for determining that your user would come
  from this group.
• Job Descriptions
• IT managers in Fortune 1000 with purchasing
  power for routers
• But a job description will provide some of the
  personality of your user.

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Keep Your Persona Set Small

• In a movie with a huge cast of characters, can
  you predict how the busboy would behave in a
  certain situation?
• Minimum number of personas required to illustrate
  key goals and behavior patterns

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How Many Personas?

• 3 or 4 usually suffice
• Focus on one primary persona
• Not necessarily the primary business target
• The persona whom, if satisfied, means others will
  more likely be satisfied

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User Research Personas

• Contextual Interviews
• Individual Interviews
• Surveys (Online)
• Focus Groups
• Usability Testing

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Developing Personas

• Psychographic
• Goals, tasks, motivation
• Webographic
• Net usage and experience, gear, usage habits,
  favorite sites

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Minimum Characteristics

• a name and picture
• demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family
  status)
• job title and major responsibilities
• goals and tasks in relation to your site
• environment (physical, social, technological)
• a quote that sums up what matters most to the
  persona with relevance for your site

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Personas and goals

• Experience Goals
• End Goals
• Life Goals

Saffer p 99
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Tasks

• Personas are pointless without specific tasks!

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Scenarios

• Stories of personas engaged in tasks or achieving
  goals
• Keep in mind that goals and tasks are different
• tasks are not ends in themselves, but are merely
  things we do to accomplish goals.

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Scenarios

• Scenarios are a deepening of the persona
• Keep them task focused 4 to 5 paragraphs
• Incorporate the personas environment
• Scenarios are messy and idiosyncratic like
  life.

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Razorfish Approach (OCD)

• Categorized interview data into analytical
  frameworks
• Identified patterns within and across segments
• Mapped interviewees according to key variables
• Determined primary characteristics that define
  personas
• Chose three representative personas
• Selected primary persona

http//www.nycupa.org/past_events/razorfish-2003-0
5-20.pdf
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Ad Hoc Personas (improvisation)

• As a consultant to companies, I often find myself
  having to make my points quickly -- quite often
  in only a few hours. This short duration makes it
  impossible to have any serious attempt to gather
  data or use real observations.
• Unlike traditional Persona studies, these were
  all made-up, but each was described in sufficient
  detail (including names), so that the group all
  agreed they felt like people they knew.

Ad-Hoc Personas Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
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Ad Hoc Personas

• Typical User
• Case one A student attending a two-year
  community college while holding a full-time job.
• Persona
• a hard-working, single mother (case one), a
  serious full-time student with no outside
  experience or responsibilities

Ad-Hoc Personas Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
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Ad Hoc Personas

• Typical User
• Case two A student in a four-year institution
  who wanted to have a successful business career.
• Persona
• A serious full-time student with no outside
  experience or responsibilities

Ad-Hoc Personas Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
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Ad Hoc Personas

• Typical User
• Case three A student who was only in school for
  lack of anything else to do, who had no desires
  except to have a good time.
• Persona
• A lackadaisical, laid-back goof-off

Ad-Hoc Personas Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
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Normans Conclusions

• Do Personas have to be accurate?
• Do they require a large body of research?
• Not always

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Narrative Persona
http//www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas/inde
x.html
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• Talking about hypothetical users with real names
  and personalities can be too much for some.
• The storytelling nature of personas just does not
  fit with some organizational or team cultures.

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http//www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html
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http//www.ers.usda.gov/AboutERS/oursite/Personas/
PolicyGatekeepers.pdf
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http//www.ers.usda.gov/AboutERS/oursite/Personas/
Press_Media.pdf
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http//bobulate.com/documents/scenarios.pdf
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http//bobulate.com/documents/scenarios.pdf
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Brief Persona Set by Peter Merholz
http//www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/03/16/a-litt
le-thing-about-personas/
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Resources

• Adaptive Path Tools
• Ad-Hoc Personas Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
• 3 persona examples by razorfish (2001)
• Personas Creation/Usage Toolkit (18 page
  description) by George Olsen
• Develop Personas from usability.gov
• Articles on Personas on Alan Coopers site