Hot answers tagged personas
16
Lets get our definitions straight:
A Persona is a central tendency of a group of users as revealed by research. It’s a convenient shorthand for summarizing the research. If your personas are not based on research, they are not personas. See Spool and Cooper’s Steve Calde.
User-centered Design, as a method, is the process of iteratively designing a product ...
15
The answer is in the question.
You said: They're descriptions of fictitious people designed to represent the common traits and attributes of a broader audience demographic.
Traits and attributes. Plural. They are made up combinations of several traits and attributes. Most people might have one or two, maybe even none. You might well spend a while finding ...
11
There are companies who specialise in recruitment for usability testing, they will be able to source the correct user groups for your needs. I would generally only use this route if you need to target specialisms, for instance medical staff or lawyers. I would provide examples, but it would depend upon your locale.
In my experience, having worked with ...
10
What might be constructive is to try to create personas from the information you do have.
This will highlight the assumptions you are making and the information you don't have.
You can then use this to go back to the customer with specific questions rather than having general "tell me what you want" conversations.
8
There are a number of research methods you can use depending on your scenario.
But first, state your research goals...
Get the questions out of your head and onto paper and share them with others, get feedback. Start out getting all collaborative right off the bat. Plan the whole process and verify you actually have the time and funds available.
...and ...
7
IMHO The bottom line is that all personas should be data driven, after all they are a tool to represent the user in the design/development process and as such they should be created with the attributes of the target user.
However, should all personas be created by "client specific" data? Pragmatically i don't think so. There is enough data around to support ...
7
Flickr advanced search allows to restrict the sarch according to Creative Commons criteria (e.g., usable for commercial purposes). Due to the diversity of people using flickr you can find many different kinds of pictures using the search term 'portrait' for example:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=portrait&l=commderiv&ct=0&mt=all&adv=1
6
If you can't find real users to talk to, it can help to talk to some of the people who do talk to real users - or have a job that means that they have to empathise with them. People like:
product managers
technical authors
customer support
sales
can often give useful insight.
6
Wikipedia has a pretty good section on the benefits of personas. Here, they summarize what Alan Cooper stated in The Inmates are Running the Asylum (1999):
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
...
6
Personas are a representation of your users, based on research. if your business goal is to get more new people using your system, you'll conduct your research with new people - you'll target your research on the people you want to engage with your system. There's no problem doing research on your existing user population to understand them better and meet ...
6
Yes. Aaron Walter (Designing For Emotion) references Todd Zaki Warfel and the personas he designed at MessageFirst, and also describes his own: Freddy - the MailChimp persona in Chapter 3 of his book. This Chapter can also be found on A List Apart and includes a picture of MessageFirst's updated persona design.
Related info: Todd covers personas well in his ...
6
Including the user's goals is absolutely important in creating a persona document, however I would be wary of including lower level, software requirements style information in documents.
Real users are rarely looking for enumerated lists of features like:
32 bit OS support
Windows or Mac
500 ms response time
etc. Instead, personas are made to help you ...
5
Maybe it's time to take your persona work and translate it to roles within the application itself. With role based permissions enabled in an application, you can hide or de-emphasize actions not pertinent to an individual role. This can drastically simplify the interface.
For example, an individual contributor role does not need to see or interact with the ...
5
I think you can definitely create a different persona based on time. Critical goals of a new user could be different from a returning users so creating a different persona makes sense and could help you better identify the tasks that the user is trying to accomplish. For example, consider two people using a smartphone:
Kat (new user) just got a new Android ...
5
A persona is not intended to be an accurate representation of your customers, but rather a sort of average representation of a typical class / type of customer. That makes it very difficult to validate whether your personas are good choices.
Additionally personas are chosen to try and represent a wide range of who you think your typical customers will be. ...
5
I would probably not call anthropomorphous objects 'personas', but I think I see where you are going. Two things first:
I would normally expect a product 'personality' to be the result of a branding idea/process and not the other way around (brand is friendly > product is friendly).
My background is not in marketing but in social sciences.
Two ...
4
I agree with you to a certain extent but I think the same argument can be levelled against almost all the other UX Activities. Imagine creating wireframes (or lo-fi prototypes) without having done the research, analysis and positioning to back up what your building! This is as equally flawed as getting a developer to just get on with writing the code.
As ...
4
OK, I must disclose upfront that this guy is a friend of mine, but this month he's launching a website that's supposed to make the whole process of working with personas easier. One of the features is just what you asked about - access to a very large set of portrait photos taken around the world, explicitly for this purpose (with agreement signed by the ...
4
Personas aren't about a particular system so much as they are about a need that users have and the way(s) they currently address it. Your questions depend on and need to fit into the problem-space.
For example, suppose you are in the research department of an auto manufacturer trying to design the next great hit. You might ask questions about the last ...
4
One of the best methods is to conduct one-on-one user research, contextual inquiries and ethnography are good methods to look at, from these you can analyse the data using affinity diagramming, this should help you with sufficient data about your users to produce personas.
Look to research at least 6 individuals for each user type.
If unable to get access ...
4
As I mention in my answer to the question on What research methods can I use to create personas?, some key elements to keeping the persona valid and relevant include:
state your research goals before you start so that the persona can be kept relevant to your goals
define how you will use personas so that you can ensure your personas include the relevant ...
4
Some sites allow people choose between different versions of the site they want, one tailored for faster connections (AKA "broadband") and one for slower connections (AKA "dial-up"). I would default to the heavier "broadband" version because that's the majority but allow easy switching to the lighter version before any large data servings.
Then make the ...
3
I prefer to go in the other direction personally.
http://commadot.com/sticky-personas/
Your idea isnt awful tho. I often will mention actual customers when saying something like, "Do you really think [customer name] will want that feature?"
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