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

Inmates Are Running the Asylum  Alan Cooper, 1998  introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool.

 …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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

User Research Personas  Contextual Interviews  Individual Interviews  Surveys (Online)  Focus Groups  Usability Testing

Developing Personas  Psychographic  Goals, tasks, motivation  “Webographic”  Net usage and experience, gear, usage habits, favorite sites

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

Personas and goals  Experience Goals  End Goals  Life Goals Saffer – p 99

Tasks  Personas are pointless without specific tasks!

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.

Scenarios  Scenarios are a deepening of the persona  Keep them task focused – 4 to 5 paragraphs  Incorporate the persona’s environment  Scenarios are messy and idiosyncratic – like life.

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

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

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

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

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

Norman’s Conclusions:  Do Personas have to be accurate?  Do they require a large body of research?  Not always

Narrative Persona

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.

/ Brief Persona Set by Peter Merholz

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