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:
Find the users
- Study lots of users to start getting a sense of who they are
Build a hypothesis
- What is the context that matters
Verification
- Find data to support the initial patterns you identified
Finding Patterns
- List the patterns/categories you found
Construct Personas
-Avoid stereotypes
To use personas, you generally follow these steps:
Define Situations
- Come up with scenarios where the persona will be used
Validate and Buy In
- Make sure the team agrees
Dissemination of Knowledge
- Share with new team members / participants
Creating Scenarios
- Create real-world scenarios where the personas will use the technology
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
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.
Look at your persona and consider the design elements you need to include. Make a list of
these design points.
Next, sketch 2-3 substantially different chair designs that consider the design points from #1.
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.