Fluid Personas

• Sakai Personas
• uPortal example Personas
• Fluid Content Management Personas

What is a Persona?

Personas are a way to model users' goals based on user and domain research.  Along with guiding the design, they are a means of communicating what is being learned with the larger community . Personas are detailed descriptions of archetypical people constructed out of well-understood, highly specific patterns of data about real people. The goal of user profiling, of creating personas, is to make user-centered design possible.

Why are personas needed?

"Interaction design is a complex and difficult craft and requires good tools like any other. The popularity of personas has exploded because they are the foundational tool upon which the practice of interaction design rests. Interaction design is about making a particular group of humans effective at achieving a narrow set of goals. Because using personas is a remarkably powerful technique for bringing those humans and their objectives into focus, it becomes the most critical tool for designing the behavior of software." - Alan Cooper

"No matter what we are designing, building, or helping to build, we want our products (including software, hardware, consumer goods, and services) to be useful, appreciated, and profitable. We want to help create products quickly and cost effectively, but with the right set of features and good quality. We want these products to hit the market and instantly inspire demand, desire, and loyalty. We want people to use our products repeatedly and happily, encountering just the right functions at the right times and finding that the products grow with them as they develop expertise. We want our efforts to result in products that delight people, and to delight people we have to have some idea of who these people are and what they want." - The Persona Lifecycle

The problem:

• Being user-centered is not natural
• Users are complicated and varied
• Those who may be doing user and market research are not typically the people who actually design and build the product
• The word "user" isn't very helpful (like "injury" is to the ER)
• Raw data isn't inherently useful, and neither are most reports

Personas put a face on the user - a memorable, engaging, and actionable image that serves as the design target. They convey information about user to your product team in ways that other artifacts cannot. Personas will help you, your team, and your organization become more user focused.

Personas:

• Make assumptions about users explicit (common language to talk meaningfully about users)
• Place the focus on specific users rather than on "everyone"
• In limiting our choices, personas help us make better decisions
• Personas engage the product design and development team (personas are fun)

How is a persona created?

Persona Creation

How is a persona used in the product development lifecycle?

Designing with Personas

1. Use personas to plan your product

• Analyze competition through the eyes of your personas
• Brainstorm possible features using your personas
• Prioritize features using a persona-weighted feature matrix

2. Use personas to explore design solutions

• Scenarios and Design Mapping
• Mood boards and visual design explorations

3. Use personas to evaluate your solutions

• Cognitive walkthroughs and design reviews with personas (step through the product and reflect on the user experience)
• User testing and ongoing user research with personas (use personas as a recruiting profile for user testing, results can refine the personas and identify areas of further research)
• Quality assurance (QA) testing and bug bashes (focus QA testing and create persona-based test cases, persona bug labeling (23 Joe bugs, 43 Susan bugs))

4. Use personas to support the release of your product

• Documentation, training, and support materials (personas can help focus instructional materials, guidebooks, and editorial content)
• Marketing and sales (tailor efforts based on personas, differentiate between users and customers (students versus IT, for example))

Remember, the goal of personas is to keep the user in view throughout the product lifecycle. Personas are not perfect for everything, but are very useful when utilized properly.

Persona Resources

• data driven design research personas - Great, visual intro presentation on personas, touching on many of the things discussed above