Personas

Discussion articles

  • Accessibility in the analysis phase: personas
    The purpose of personas is to make the users seem more real, to help designers keep realistic ideas of users throughout the design process. A persona with a disability includes the same specific characteristics, demographics, experience level, and personal details as other personas. Personas that include accessibility considerations also include a description of the limiting condition (disability or situational limitation) and the adaptive strategies for using the product.

  • Accessibility in the analysis phase: user group profiles
    User group profiles describe the characteristics of product users, the people who use a product. Because many designers start out with little or no familiarity with accessibility issues, adding accessibility considerations to user group profiles is particularly important.

  • Ad-hoc personas and empathetic focus
    Many researchers feel that personas should be very accurate, and although artificial, should be based on extensive research into the customer base. Moreover, these same researchers believe they should be very detailed: "Mary is a 37 year-old single mother, working as a secretary for a law firm in the daytime and taking engineering classes at night at the local community college. She has red hair and ... ." I disagree with this philosophy.

  • An introduction to personas and how to create them
    "This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas,
    and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own."
    (Tina Calabria - Step Two Designs)

  • Bringing your personas to life in real life
    When presenting, talking about your personas, or referring to them in writing, communicate as though they are real people, people that you know. Express it like you are talking about a friend.

  • Creating and using personas and scenarios to guide site design (PDF)
    A presentation on the development and use of personas by Razorfish.
    (Dai Pham, Janiece Greene)

  • Creating personas for information rich websites
    Design personas are one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolbox. They help bring the vibrant, living presence of 'a specific user' into your design process. They facilitate communication between your engineering, marketing and design teams. Trouble is, how to get started with the making or creation of personas.

  • Creating quality personas: understanding the levers that drive user behaviour (PDF)
    "The best personas will also go the extra step to describe key behaviors such as a decision making process, an information browsing approach, or a shopping mode--the drivers that affect how people approach a given solution."
    (Shannon Ford)

  • Customer story-telling at the heart of business success
    "As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by "doing the math", which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding. We create personas to build upon that platform by bringing the individuals within those segments to life. These are prototypical, but fundamentally real, stories of the multidimensional lives of specific customers. This report discusses how the Arc Worldwide’s Experience Planning group uses storytelling and multidimensional customer-based stories to provide relevance, direction, and resonance in today’s business planning landscape."
    (Parrish Hanna)

  • Getting from research to personas: harnessing the power of data
    The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona.

  • How design personas differ from typical customer segmentation models
    "Traditional customer segmentation models don't provide the key information about users' goals, attitudes and behaviors that is required for effective interaction design--personas do. Valid personas are derived from primary user research, foster a shared point of view among the diverse group of people who impact the customer experience, and enable design decisions. To make the most of investments in personas, firms should ensure that personas are valid, useful, and incorporated into a consistent design process."
    Note: report must be purchased
    (Moira Dorsey - Forrester Research)

  • How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 2
    "Personas and scenarios are techniques for representing your users and the things they do on your website. They are one of the key tools in iQ Content’s arsenal, and we deploy them at every opportunity because they deliver more benefits for less effort than anything else that we do. In fact, we have seen this technique transform confused and failing web projects by providing a sense of direction and purpose that set the team on the road to success."
    (John Wood - IQ Content)

  • How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 1
    "This is the first of two articles in which I’ll be making the business case for using personas and scenarios to improve your website. I’ll give you a flavour of what’s involved in using the personas and scenarios and provide a few examples of the kinds of problems we’ve solved for our clients using these techniques. In this first article, we’ll look at the core concepts of personas, leaving scenarios until next month."
    (John Wood - IQ Content)

  • Is this you? (Reader persona design: an example)
    "Do you work in a medium-to-large organization whose web content you feel could be put to better use? If so, you’re my target reader."
    (Gerry McGovern)

  • Key steps in creating your reader persona
    "The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include."
    (Gerry McGovern)

  • Making personas more powerful: details to drive strategic and tactical design
    Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here?

  • Making personas more powerful: details to drive strategic and tactical design
    "Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here?"
    (George Olsen)

  • Making personas sparkle like diamonds, part 1
    "Early in our company's life, persona development was largely an intuitive process. We wanted to develop a process we could use to train clients and partners to duplicate the persona development process. To do this, we delved into literature and film to understand character development. We were fortunate to be introduced to a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and script evaluator, David Freeman. Freeman taught us about 'character diamonds'... Today we'll share what we learned."
    (Bryan Eisenberg)

  • Making user representations more usable (PDF)
    Chapter 1 from John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, Morgan Kaufmann 2006.

  • Perfecting your personas
    It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them.

  • Persona development and the law of averages
    "Persona" is a hot buzzword in this industry, yet most companies that create personas haven't fully embraced everything they have to offer. Most personas are watered-down and hard to relate to. The worst of the lot are lifeless outlines of a company's demographic targets. Most often, they don't deliver the expected outcome from using the persona approach.
    (Bryan Eisenberg)

  • Persona development for information rich designs (PDF)
    Defining information architecture for complex web sites requires understanding user information needs and mental models in that domain. Personas, or user archetypes, created for such domains should also reflect types of information needs, and usage of information set. We have created a statistical technique to identify important underlying groupings of information needs. In a preliminary study, we show how designers can use this information in conjunction with data from interviews and observations to generate and refine personas.

  • Persona-led heuristic inspection is here
    "Sometimes we need to review a product for usability in circumstances where usability testing isn’t an option. Lack of time, lack of budget, unwilling client: you name it. So an improvement on the heuristic inspection would be a great idea."
    (Caroline Jarrett)

  • Persona non grata
    "Without any research to back assumptions, it's easy to end up with a product built for what designers think the users are like, rather than what the users really are like. It's the difference between reading about someone and actually meeting them, between fantasy and reality. The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior."
    (Dan Saffer)

  • Personas and contextual design
    Personas, introduced by Alan Cooper, are a technique of goal-directed design that is meant to help designers gain clarity and provide focus during the design process. They describe the goals and activities of archetypal users in a 1-2 page description based on a few ethnographic interviews with real users. Aside from the fact that personas are a current design trend, what makes personas interesting? Certainly they are seductive to design teams since they can be quick to create if they only require a few (2-3) interviews and a good writer. But good designers and managers know that reliable requirements gathering and design that meets the needs of the business, the market, and the user is not so simply constructed. So something else must be going on.

  • Personas and persona design resources
    "Tools for creating a shared vision to drive the design of useful and desirable products".
    (Quarry Integrated Communication)

  • Personas and storytelling
    "Personas work because they tell stories. Stories are part of every community. They communicate culture, organize and transmit information. Most importantly, they spark the imagination as you explore new ideas. They can ignite action."
    (Whitney Quesenbery)

  • Personas and the customer decision-making process
    With this case study I want to show how our team used the concept of personas--fictional, representative user archetypes--and the customer decision-making process model in a project, in order to capture the nature of customers and their needs and concerns as they progress through the customer decision-making process.

  • Personas and user profiles
    A collection of resources from STC Usability SIG.

  • Personas: bringing users alive (PDF)
    Presentation notes on persona development and use.

  • Personas, goals and emotional design
    "In the first three chapters of Emotional Design, Norman presents his three-level theory of cognitive processing and discusses its potential importance to design. However, Emotional Design does not suggest a method for systematically integrating Norman’s insightful model of cognition and affect into the practice of user experience design."
    (Robert Reimann - UXmatters)

  • Persona sketching
    "The value of personas in Web design is certainly debatable, but I've found them very useful, if for nothing else then using them to help pull your clients and stakeholders into a discussion about the people what interact with your designs. As well, they can be use for many other things aside from informing Web design and can be a great way to pull business and user goals together."
    (D. Keith Robinson)

  • Personas: matching a design to the users' goals
    By closely adhering to the goals of a specific persona, the designers satisfy the needs of the many users who have goals similar to those of the persona. The process is even more effective when designers design for several personas simultaneously, as they can satisfy an even larger number of users.

  • Personas, participatory design and product development: an infrastructure for engagement (DOC)
    "The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as ‘personas’, is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined."
    (Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt - Microsoft)

  • Personas: practice and theory (PDF)
    In three years of use, our colleagues have extended Cooper's technique to make personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. This article describes our approach and outlines the psychological theory that explains why personas are more engaging than design based on scenarios.

  • Personas: setting the stage for building usable information sites
    As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them.

  • Reconciling market segments and personas
    Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organisations can use to design and sell successful products.

  • Segmentation versus personas: where should B2B marketers start?
    "Most B2B firms segment prospects and customers by basic criteria like company size, industry, and geography. Unfortunately, with this approach, it is difficult to precisely align marketing messages with buyer pain points or purchase cycle stages. B2B marketers improve their customer knowledge when they base segmentation on prospect roles, needs, or preferences, rather than sales-centric categories. By applying customer-centric segmentation criteria and using the principles of Scenario Design, B2B marketers can develop communication strategies that resonate with the specific business challenges and life-cycle issues that customers face."
    Note: report must be purchased
    (Laura Ramos - Forrester Research)

  • The origin of personas
    The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness.

  • The return on investment for personas
    "Extract from The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin. "
    (Anne Light, Usability News)

  • The role of personas in successful scenario design
    "Scenario design helps users achieve their goals. How do you plan scenarios? Well, if you're designing scenarios for a commercial Web site, one that demonstrates return on investment (ROI) by getting sales, leads, or registrants, you design persuasive scenarios by turning the information you have on your users into personas."
    (Future Now)

  • Three important benefits of personas
    Personas are becoming a regular staple in many of the development teams we talk to. The method helps teams make a smooth translation between requirements and design, resulting with much cleaner designs. The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.
    (Jared M. Spool)

  • Using personas to create user documentation
    Personas and other user-modelling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.

  • Why is it so hard to make products that people love?
    "Business people don’t sit in their offices wondering how they can make a product uglier, and designers don’t want to create products that won’t sell. Everybody (usually) wants to do the right thing for the company, the products and the customers. So why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? To make successful products, designers and business people need to speak each other's language. They need a translator to help them understand each others’ goals and decision-making process so that instead of inadvertently working against each other, they can make each others’ jobs easier. Personas are excellent translators between design and business. "
    (Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt - AIGA Design Forum)

Research articles

  • Introducing personas in a software project (PDF)
    This Masters thesis investigates the process of creating personas and introducing their use into an ongoing software project, with the objective of providing the development team with information on user goals and characteristics as well as tools to use this information effectively.

Tutorials

Interviews

  • Robert Reimann on personas
    "Robert Reimann is the president of the Interaction Design Association and is the user-experience manager at Bose, the maker of high-end stereo equipment. He helped write the book on interaction design--literally, with Alan Cooper: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design."
    (Dan Saffer)

Case studies

  • Taking the "you" out of user: my experience using personas
    A case study on how personas were used by a small startup company to help design their web-based project management tool.

  • Yahoo's approach to keeping personas alive
    "One of the big struggles teams have is creating a long-term adoption of their target personas. While personas are often accepted initially, it’s hard for the team to keep them 'alive' for the entire project duration. Our research has shown those teams which manage to keep them alive are more likely to produce more usable designs, so we’re always interested in new techniques."
    (Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)

Examples and templates

  • Accessibility in the analysis phase: example group profiles
    This page provides fictional examples of user group profiles that include accessibility considerations.

  • Accessibility in the analysis phase: example personas
    This page provides fictional examples of personas that include accessibility considerations.

  • Example personas
    Two example personas showing the format in which a persona can be presented.

  • Example personas
    Three example personas drawn from client work by Quarry Integrated Communications.

  • Organisational management personas (PDF)
    A set of personas for a HR application, showing primary, secondary and other personas.

  • MSN personas
    A series of key personas developed by MSN to represent their target audience segments.

  • Persona chart (DOC)
    From Adaptive Path, a document showing the format for a sample persona.

  • Persona creation and usage toolkit (PDF)
    Personas are supposed to be tools to aid in making design trade-offs. But too often they've become more of a check-off item. Arguably this is because personas as commonly done lack enough actionable detail to help make hard decisions that occurs as strategy resolves into interface. Notes from Making Personas More Powerful, a presentation by George Olsen at the 5th IA Summit.

  • Personas
    A set of sample personas for a fictional website.

  • Personas for the S2S project
    A discussion of the development of personas, and a set of personas used in requirements documents for a software development project in 1999.

  • Razorfish personas (PDF)
    A set of three personas showing personal narrative and key characteristics along with scenarios of use.

  • User profile forms
    Courtesy of Gerry Gaffney, these user profile forms are four pages in length,and can be used to gather information about users (such as education, age, and computer usage).