Understanding Personas 1

By Ian Burgess On February 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment · In Software Development, User Experience

In both software development and response marketing the understanding of persona’s is fundamental to successfully achieving the goals of the project.

Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), however they are also used in industrial design too. Wikipedia

So what is involved a Persona:

Creating

The first step in the process we use is to actually remember that in many cases the users already exist or you have a Idea who they are. It always helps to create a persona that can be encompassed on a single page and often contains a picture of the imaginary individual. The rest of the structure of the document contains a table with information related to basic individual information (name, age, sex, job, family) and information relevant to the product (Internet experience, buying history, location for using Internet, computer and software, likes and dislikes).

The information in a persona should be checked with discussions and reviews of existing user and new users of the product.

Using

The persona is used as a way of bring every one involved in the project/product to have a common understanding of the actual users. This helps as the team actually check their ideas and place themself in to the mind set of the persona so that we don’t go of on tangents of pointless functionality. This is why it always helps to give personas names as it helps the team actually get into the characters and review the ideas.

Personas are a creative tool allowing the team to look at solving gaps between the Product/System and the users needs and experience. It is in many cases, especially in software development, there it is not gap in understanding the functionality (technical functionality) outlining how the system interacts at the back away from the user but the project fails because there is a lack understanding of the user and how they need to interact with the product.

For a good example of this think about most accounting software the developers have a complete understanding of the back end process but only recently have the front end interface approved to better match the users requirements.

I will carry on with personas in the future and go in to more detail of each stage with examples.

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