Personas Peg Achterman October 21 2013 Personas Developed

Personas Peg Achterman October 21, 2013

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 user of internet) • 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?

Ideal Persona Development • Synthesized from interviews with real people • Summarized description includes behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes

Experience Goals • How the person 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

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: 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/200 3_08/Origin_of_Personas. asp

Persona – 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 is a product manager for an enterprise B 2 B 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…

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 (decisionmaking)

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 • Power of narrative to engage • Help create scenarios that work • Breathe life into task analyses (1/2)

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

Purpose 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

Remember the 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 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. Info-seeking habits Attitudes, including pet peeves Personal and professional goals Motivation: why would this person use your product?

Conclusion • Exercise: Create a persona that will use your site – at least one. Include a photo, a description etc. Then make a page and post this to your site with a tag “persona” so I can find it.