Personas

Personas are descriptions of individual people who represent groups of users that would interact with your system. You use them to guide your design. For example, as you are discussing features, you may ask "How would Mary feel about this," where Mary is a persona you have developed.

The good things about personas is that they help you get your focus off yourself and your own preferences and also help you avoid designing for edge cases (i.e. the rare user with uncommon needs). On the downside, they are not scientific, not necessarily representative, and can sometimes be misleading.

The basic steps for designing personas are:

  1. Find the users - Study lots of users to start getting a sense of who they are
  2. Build a hypothesis - What is the context that matters
  3. Verification - Find data to support the initial patterns you identified
  4. Finding Patterns - List the patterns/categories you found
  5. Construct Personas -Avoid stereotypes
To use personas, you generally follow these steps:
  1. Define Situations - Come up with scenarios where the persona will be used
  2. Validate and Buy In - Make sure the team agrees
  3. Dissemination of Knowledge - Share with new team members / participants
  4. Creating Scenarios - Create real-world scenarios where the personas will use the technology
  5. Ongoing Development - Keep personas updated
Academic Readings

Web Readings

Today's Video Lecture

This is me talking to give you an overview, but the YouTube videos below provide an excellent introduction to how you develop and use personas. Please watch mine and all the videos below.

What are Personas?

Creating Personas

Required Exercise: Build a Persona

Create a persona that represents a class of users for your produce app. Your persona should include:
  • Name
  • Photo
  • Background story
  • Basic demographics
  • Personal attributes that explain how this person approaches the world and how they feel about things related to your app
  • General goals, needs, motivations, and challenges
You can download a powerpoint template here, which includes a couple examples.

Remember - personas should be stories of a specific person who represents a general group of potential users. Create your persona in powerpoint or another tool, and export an image (please do NOT post a ppt, pptx, or pdf; make a jpg or png file) that has all the information. Post it to the Persona Produce User Exercise thread on the discussion board, and explain the broad group of potential users that this persona represents.

Look at other people's personas and comment on at least one other thread. Keep an eye out for similar personas that might be merged. Since you are all working with the same app, it's likely you will come up with similar personas.

Required Exercise: Design around a persona

Here are some stories that represent light-weight personas.

You will work with one persona. I'm assigning you a persona based on the first letter of your last name:

  • A, or Y-Z, gets Grandpa
  • B-F gets Ralph
  • G-L gets Maggie
  • M-O and T gets Neil
  • P-X gets Lisa
We will be doing a variant on the Five Chairs exercise.

Your job is to design a chair for your persona.

  1. Look at your persona and consider the design elements you need to include. Make a list of these design points.
  2. Next, sketch 2-3 substantially different chair designs that consider the design points from #1.
  3. Review the sketches and choose one. Using cardboard (like from a shipping box) and tape, design a standing model of your chair. It does not have to be life size, but try to make it a close match for your actual design.
In the discussion board on ELMS, post the following:
  • Which persona you had
  • Your design points
  • Images of your sketches
  • At least one photo of your standing model
You can scan or take photos of your sketches. Comment on at least one post by someone who designed for the same persona you had.