User experience personas
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Transcript of User experience personas
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