Copyright 2007 TIBCO Software. Proprietary and Confidential

TIBCO User Experience January 2008

Taking the “You” out of User Persona creation, evaluation and use

Personas – what and why

What is a Persona?

A model of user goals, attitudes, and behaviors and a key member of a product design and

development team

A good Persona is…

•  crafted from well-researched, well-understood data about many real individuals

•  presented as a vivid, narrative description

•  consolidated into a single “person” to represent a user segment

•  well-publicized

Personas should not be…

•  based on one person’s or even several people’s opinions

•  built as an exercise and then hidden away

•  confused with Users, Roles or Skill Inventories

•  easy to create

•  a dramatic shift in the way to design and build products

What will personas do for us?

•  Put a face on the end user •  Provide an environment for better decision

making •  Help us increase product value, usability and

sale-ability •  Streamline design and development •  Make us more confident in design and decision-

making.

Why do we need personas?

Building products based on what (real) people need seems obvious, but...

–  A user-centered approach isn’t natural

–  Designers, engineers and product managers are not users

–  People are complicated

–  Communication is difficult

But, we build for the user already, don’t we?

•  User-centric design is a vague ideal with lots of potential tools and processes

•  Personas are at the center of a specific PROCESS

Persona User

Specific life story Anything to anyone

Published Difficult to talk about

Every attribute linked to research

Based on an opinion

Personas vs. Roles and Skills?

Persona Role Skill Inventory

Describes what a person is

Describes what a person does

Describes what a person knows

Who uses formal personas?

•  Automotive: –  Chrysler (B2C) –  Ford (B2C) –  MINI Cooper (B2C)

•  Financial services: –  Discover (B2C) –  E*TRADE (B2C) –  Fidelity (B2B, B2C) –  Sovereign Bank (B2B,

B2C)

•  Manufacturing: –  Dell (B2C, B2B)

•  Retail: –  Amazon (B2C) –  Best Buy (B2C) –  Staples (B2B, B2C)

•  Shipping: –  FedEx (B2B, B2C) –  UPS (B2B, B2C)

•  Technology: –  Analog Devices (B2B) –  Microsoft (B2B, B2C) –  Nortel (B2B) –  SAP (B2B)

Persona development and use

Forrester’s Persona Lifecycle

I.  Family planning II.  Conception and gestation III.  Birth and maturation

IV.  Adulthood V.  Lifetime achievement,

reuse and retirement

6 Steps of Building 1/2

1.  Identify important categories of users 2.  Process the data 3.  Identify and create skeletons

Conception

6 Steps of Building 2/2

1.  Prioritize (select) the skeletons 2.  Develop selected skeletons into personas

3.  Validate the personas against the data

Gestation

How to tell a persona story

•  Personal profile and job description •  Resources and skills •  A day in the life

•  The problem •  A new day in the life

Sample persona

Sample persona

The right number of personas

Source: Forrester research, September 10, 2004 “How To Design Sites That Satisfy Millions Of Users”

Persona evaluation

•  Based on primary research (interviews) with real users

•  Sounds like a real person •  Compelling narrative •  Calls out key attributes and high-level goals

•  Enables design decisions •  Usable •  Has appropriate production values

Adapted from Forrester Research

Persona success is not guaranteed

Ingredients for failure include: •  Lack of obvious need •  Lack of leadership support

•  Not credible or based on real data •  Poor communication •  Ineffective use

Personas at TIBCO

How we intend to bring Personas to TIBCO

•  Evangelize the evolution from our current Role Descriptions

•  Conduct simple persona research on one product

•  Share the process and the results with all interested parties.

•  Commit to ongoing lifecycle management with shared ownership

How we can get started

•  Skeleton personas and validation

•  Launch, communication and use

•  Evaluation

•  Assumption Personas

•  Existing role descriptions

•  Primary research

•  Affinity grouping

What do I have to worry about?

•  Nothing

•  When we’ve got something useful to share, everyone will know

•  Doesn’t change anything about how we work

–  Gives each of us more information

–  Clarifies the definition and use of the tools we have

For the curious

•  The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

–  [Cooper, 2004]

•  The Persona Lifecycle –  [Pruitt and Adlin, 2006]

•  About Face 2.0 –  [Cooper and Reimann, 2003]

•  Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

–  [Wodke, 2002]

Q&A

Copyright 2007 TIBCO Software. Proprietary and Confidential

Taking the “You” out of User Persona creation, evaluation and use