Clicks & Notes

User Interface Engineering - Perfecting Your Personas

• “A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design.”
• personas are based on ethnographic interviews with real people
• when creating a persona (usually captured as a 1-2 page document), describe the following:
  • behaviour patterns
  • goals
  • skills
  • attitudes
  • environment
• adding a few fictional details makes the persona more lifelike
• things to keep in mind when designing your personas:
  • personas represent behavior patterns, not job descriptions
  • don’t create too many of them – just enough to illustrate key goals and behaviour patterns
  • your marketing and sales targets may not be your design targets
  • each persona should have three or four important goals that help focus the design
  • tasks are not goals; tasks are a means to accomplish goals
  • personas must be specific to the design problem

See also:

• New Thinking - Key steps in creating your reader persona
• New Thinking - Is this you? (Reader persona design: an example)

And, taking more of a marketing POV:

• ClikZ.com - Are You Designing for Usability or Sales?, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
• ClikZ.com - Persona Development and the Law of Averages
• ClikZ.com - Making Personas Sparkle Like Diamonds, Part 1 and Part 2
• GrokDotCom - When You Create Personas, Stay Clear of Stereotypes