What is Persona?

Personas are a design tool that helps the design team to focus on designing for the real needs of real people. This tool helps to move the focus from features to addressing needs.

Why Requirements are not good enough ?

Writing a long list of features, by making them up or asking to client may not be good enough.

How about asking directly to User ?

Designer/Development team will not know what the end user wants, necessary team may ask a potential user/s to find out what they want. This may lead to design for an aggregate user.

At least is Guaranteed to make everyone happy !!

 

How about designing for an average user ?

By taking the most common features and/or properties of most typical user requires.

Guaranteed to keep most users happy!

Imagine designing an application (a bit like Skype) aimed at helping primary school children communicate with grandparents 

What is the average user?

Instead find and focus on needs of people and their problems

• Great designers discover real problems users are having in their lives
• They then focus on ways to solve them

Persona in Detail

A persona is a precise description of a user and what he/she wishes to accomplish. They are :

• Fictional, have names, pictures and lives
• Detailed archetypical version of a user 
• Cover distinct groupings of behaviours, goals and motivations 
• Based on data collected about potential users

Taking users seriously

Personas help the team think of the users they are designing for as real people 

• Helps designer/programmers/etc take user needs seriously 
• Have a concrete person you are designing for 
  • not just a list of features

If Persona is fictional then who are they ?

• Not real people but realistic, archetypical ones
• Not the programmers or the designers
  • Personas are partly about stopping computer scientists designing for themselves
• Not blurred, aggregate or average users
  • Avoid compromises 
  • Avoid feature bloat of designing for everyone

Goal Directed Design

• Personas are built around the goals of the potential users

DONT Forget Personas are data driven !

• You do not create personas just by making up some arbitrary characters.
• This stage is similar to requirements capture in a standard software engineering process but with a focus on people NOT features.

Creating personas: 

1) Research what is needed: Find out who will use the product, what their goals and motivations are (in life, not just in narrowly using the product) 

• Use in depth interviews, observation and ethnography 

2) Create a large cast (eg 3-12) of fictional people: 

• positive personas 
  • to represent each new potential user,
• with possibly separate behaviours, goals and motivations

3) Merge those with sufficiently similar goals to be represented by single primary personas:

• Primary persona is the person the design MUST work for 
• Keep anti-personas (negative personas) too: people you are NOT designing for

KEY POINT

If you have more than One Primary Persona then you would need more than 1 interface (or it will be confusing and hard to use).

How to use Personas

• All the design team should get to know the cast of personas 
• Everyone should refer to the personas by name in design meetings and design documents through the whole design process (Never talk about the user) 
• Focus on designing for the primary persona 

Ex: Primary Persona having the name Sam.

 Is this what that Sam needs? 

Would Sam want to print the map anyway?

When discussing features ask whether the persona would use/want/need it: 

Is this something Sam really needs? 

Would adding it make it harder for Sam to do the things he/she wants to do most of all?

Conclusion 

Once you obtain your Primary Persona focus on what your Primary persona actually needs, find out their problems and aim to solve them. Dont forget about anti-personas, they will help you to find out what you shoud not focus/aim.