Toolbox Series: Personas
Some might put a persona, or user profile, in a different area of the process but for someone who enjoys a good narrative like myself, it’s helpful to get to know your user. After I interview and have a strong sense of the end user I usually create an initial draft. Then I run it by a subject matter expert, revise, and hand it out to the project team and facilitate discussion over the working persona.
A persona not only aids your team in having a common person to talk about, but it also helps you imagine what Mike the Mechanic or Joe the Jet Pilot would prefer when it comes to those big decisions. In the past I’ve handed out a copy of my created persona to my project team so that they can offer input and we can all become acquainted with the user. And magically, the ‘user’ is transformed into a person with a face and name.
The persona is formed from a conglomeration of multiple target users and from there, determining your ‘archetypal’ user that reflects the users’ goals and motivations.
There are many different ways to go about organizing the actual data of the persona, but the method that I’ve found to be short, sweet, and helpful to the team is to create a personal background with some demographic information, motivations for the persona as related to their job, and how the system can support those goals and motivations. For example, Arthur the Operations Manager is a 30 year old college graduate that climbed up the company ladder to where he is today. He’d like to open his own company after gaining more knowledge in the Logistics field. He looks for accuracy in state of inventory, wishes to maximize revenue, and promote good communication between the team and his superiors.
Quick, simple, and has some staying power with the project team. It also helps to have a friendly photo of the person at work so that they can associate that person with the duties they perform on the job.
It’s a surprisingly simple artifact once you get down to it, but it makes a world of difference in your team’s communications.
[...] to users. Sometimes one product will have multiple users and many different roles. Creating personas is one way to deal with this. For e-commerce sites you can have “Sharon the Shopper” and [...]
Here Comes the Heresy « One Girl’s Climb into the Wild World of Design
April 27, 2009