1. The Limits of Personas Peter Bagnall Guy Dewsbury Ian Sommerville

2. The use of personas  Designers create solutions  Need to test solutions to ensure appropriateness  User testing during design is impractical  Personas provide high-speed rough and ready testing

3. The use of personas  Personas are proxies for real users  Avoid self referential design  Used with scenarios (not use cases)  Guide design  Specific enough  Best to design for one ‘person’  But that ‘person’ shouldn’t have gratuitous quirks

4. Why personas work  Perspective taking  Ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective  Learnt skill  Normally learnt around age 4  Becomes richer with age  To develop it requires life experience  Similar skill to method acting

5. Making personas  You can’t just make them up!  Represent the archetypal user  Based on data from field studies and ethnographic research  Personas are not averages  Aim for a challenging but realistic target

6. Problems making personas  Relies on being able to gain an accurate understand of people  People aren't always comfortable talking about sensitive personal topics  Requires empathy, but empathy can be inaccurate  people can hide their feelings

7. Problems using personas  Not possible to see a design from a perspective you don't understand  Persona descriptions aren't detailed enough to help get that understanding  Designer must therefore have prior understanding of the archetype  Persona acts as an anchor

8. Problems using personas  Too many personas gets confusing  Becomes harder to get ‘into character’  Most projects have a few personas to guide the design  Using personas to represent impairments too makes for a combinatorial nightmare

9. Questions?