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Persona (user experience)

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For other uses, see Persona (user experience) (disambiguation).

Personas or personae are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are given characteristics and are assumed to be in particular environments based on known users’ requirements so that these elements can be taken into consideration when creating scenarios for conceptualizing a site. Cooper (1999) outlined the general characteristics and uses of personas for product design and development.

In the context of software requirements gathering, a user persona is a representation of a real audience group. A persona description includes a user’s context, goals, pain points, and major questions that need answers. Personas are a common tool in Interaction Design (IxD)

Advantages of personas

According to Pruitt and Adlin, 2006, the use of personas offers several benefits in product development (cf. Grudin and Pruitt, 2002; Cooper, 1999). Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and feature definition. Pruitt and Adlin argue that personas are easy to communicate to engineering teams and thus allow engineers, developers, and others to absorb customer data in a palatable format. They present several examples of personas used for purposes of communication in various development projects (Pruitt and Adlin, 2006).

Benefits

  • Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
  • Team members’ solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
  • Provide a human "face" so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.

(Cooper, 1999)

Personas based upon ethnographic research

Some designers feel that personas should be based on ethnographic research into users and should not be manufactured/fabricated. [weasel words] The use of ethnographic research helps the creation of a number of archetype users that can be used to develop products that deliver positive user experiences. By feeding in real data, ethnographic research allows design teams to avoid generating stereotypical users that may bear no relation to the actual user’s reality.

Criticism of personas

Criticism of personas falls into three general categories: analysis of the underlying logic, concerns about practical implementation, and empirical results (cf. Chapman and Milham, 2006; Rönkkö, 2005). In terms of logic, personas have been argued to have no clear relationship to real customer data. Personas are fictional and therefore there is no clear way to determine how many users are represented by any given persona. For this reason, critics have claimed that personas have no definite relationship to real customer data and therefore cannot be scientific. Chapman & Milham (2006) described the purported flaws in considering personas as a scientific research method.

In practice, the utility of personas on teams varies from team to team. Some development groups may adopt them readily while others may express considerable skepticism. In empirical results, the research to date has offered soft metrics for the success of personas, such as anecdotal feedback from stakeholders. Rönkkö (2005) has described how team politics and other organizational issues led to limitations of the personas method in one set of projects.

References:

  • Carroll, John M. Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions. MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0-262-03279-1
  • Carroll, J.M. ed. Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. Wiley, 1995. ISBN 0-471-07659-7
  • Chapman, C.N. & Milham, R. The personas' new clothes. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) 2006, San Francisco, CA. October 2006. [1]
  • Cooper, Alan. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. SAMS, 1999. ISBN 0-672-31649-8
  • Grudin, J. and Pruitt, J. Personas, participatory design and product development: an infrastructure for engagement. Paper presented at Participatory Design Conference 2002, Malmo, Sweden. June 2002.
  • Pruitt, John & Adlin, Tamara. The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2006. ISBN 0-12-566251-3
  • Rönkkö, K. An empirical study demonstrating how different design constraints, project organization, and contexts limited the utility of personas. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2005, Waikoloa, HI. January 2005.

See also

Product Personas blog by Bonnie Rind

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