Personas

Kathy E. Gill19 Feb 2008

Agenda Some more task exercises Pop down to MCDM info session Personas mini lecture Personas hands-on But first… Nate’s link example (2

slides)

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 memory Easy to learn Protect data integrity How 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) Affected Exclusionary Stakeholders

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

Personas in Practice (1/3)

Help focus attention on a specific audience

Help make assumptions about the target audience more specific

Help 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 want

Provide 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 engage Help create scenarios that work Breathe 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

In Sum, Needed Details: A real name Age A photo Personal info, including family and home life Work environment (not a job description!) Computer proficiency and comfort with the Web Info-seeking habits Attitudes, including pet peeves Personal and professional goals Motivation: why would this person use your high-tech

product?

From Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Indianapolis: Sams, 1999.

Conclusion Personas are a 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

Coming up … Next week:

Guest Lecture: Craig Maedgen Discussion Leader: Sarah

Third assignment (revisit tasks from #2) due Friday

No class 4 March (work on project!) We’ll work on wireframes, sitemaps on the

11th

Guest lecture 11 March (interface designer for Web 2.0 apps) and your pitch