Clicks & Notes

Avenue A / Razorfish - Creating Quality Personas: Understanding the Levers that Drive User Behavior (PDF, 778 kb)

The persona is a design tool that enforces discipline in the site development process. Because there are many ways to define a user and his or her complex set of motivations, creating a precise persona with a detailed personality, background and behavior helps to focus the design team on meeting the distinct goals and needs of a particular user type. In addition, defining and designing for a set of specific personas helps to avoid the common practice of trying to design for all users.

• three basic steps in the persona development process:
  • identify target research segments – review a company’s existing customer segments and supporting market research
  • conduct qualitative research with real people – techniques can include ethnographic observation and interviews, diaries, etc.
  • analyze the data and develop the personas – look for attitudinal patterns, contexts, behaviors
• scope considerations for persona development:
  • size and diversity of the customer base
  • geographic reach
  • depth of behavioral frameworks – deeper insights require multiple data collection methods and more intensive analysis
  • desire to quantify qualitative results – personas can be “tested” through quanitative methods such as surveying

(Via GUUUI.)

See also this previous post: Creating Personas