Personas. What? When? Why?
I’ve always been a little skeptical of personas, until I had an epiphany during a presentation of a set of personas to a large banking client. More on that later, but first an introduction to personas, what they are, how we can add more meaning to them, when to use them and how useful they are.
What is a persona?
Most of us know that personas are fictional characters created to represent typical users of a website or product. The use of personas as a technique was popularised by Alan Cooper in his 1999 book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. Cooper’s original goals for personas were to allow the development team to live and breathe the user’s world and to allow the team to filter out personal quirks and focus on motivations and behaviours typical of a broad range of users, while still relating to users as individuals.
Personas are used to provide guidance on features, interactions, the complexity of those features and interactions and the visual design of the website or product. In order to achieve this, they should contain behaviour patterns of the target audience, their skills and attitudes, their environment and any other pertinent personal details. It is also useful for the personas to include goals and motivations for the use of the site or product, as well as some clue to their desires, both in relation to the site or product and life in general. It is also important to look at the personas limitations.
A typical persona might be put together on a single sheet of A4, usually containing the aspects mentioned above and usually accompanied with an image of the person being described. A memorable and slightly unusual name helps bring the persona to life and makes it easier to remember who they are throughout the design process.
Persona Overview Slide
How can we add more meaning?
The type of single page persona shown above certainly has its uses, but it can be limited by a lack of actionable data. To rectify this, George Olsen created his persona toolkit back in 2004. The toolkit is effectively a spreadsheet that can be completed to provide biographic, geographic, demographic and psychographic background information. It explores a business’s relationship to the persona and the persona’s relationship to a product and business. It further specifies the persona’s specific goals, needs and attitudes, their specific knowledge and proficiencies, some context of usage, interaction, information, sensory and emotional aspects of the user experience. It also includes any accessibility issues and any relationships among personas. In other words, the toolkit can be used to provide a wealth of data to really bring a persona to life, although clearly that data needs to be sourced from somewhere in order to be used.
The data needed to produce a persona can come from a multitude of sources, including any market research or segmentation data that is readily available from the usual suppliers, such as Forrester, Cap Gemini, Mindshare, etc. Furthermore, interviews with a cross section of potential users or focus groups and workshops can provide the necessary background information.
Using the Olsen toolkit can be cumbersome due to the shear wealth of information that it can provide, so personally I like to distill this information back into a one page overview as shown above, safe in the knowledge that should I have a question that is not answered, I will most likely find the answer by going back to the toolkit.
When to use personas?
I agree with Jared Spool, in that I find personas to be generally useful, but more so in the following situations:
- When the design team is an actual team, with more than a single individual working the entire process from concepts through delivery
- When the team members are different from their users (which is most of the time)
- When the team members do not have constant direct interaction with the users
- And when different users will interact with the artifacts differently because they have different intentions, context, skills, knowledge or experience
What are the benefits of personas?
The single biggest benefit of personas is that they put a human face on otherwise abstract customer data and allow clients to sanity check the target audience we are designing for. This is the point that brings me to my epiphany about the usefulness of personas. We were creating a new corporate website for a bank and one of the members of the target audience was a student. The persona we designed was a typical laid back, even slightly lazy student, but on presenting this back to the client, we were informed that they did not recognise the person. All the students normally visiting their site for research are top performers, go-getters and in the top percentile of their classes. That single moment restored my faith in personas, since without them, we would have happily carried on making the wrong assumptions about the target audience.
Putting this human face on reams of customer date may also help designers infer what a real person might need, inference which in turn may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition. Using an overview persona in conjunction with the Olsen toolkit means the personas are easy to communicate and allow visual designers, developers, and others to easily absorb the customer data.
Importantly, personas help the team have a shared understanding of the target audience in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts. They can help prevent us from projecting our own mental models on the product design and they help us keep the focus on cases that are most likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases.
What are some of the criticism of personas?
Perhaps the biggest criticism is that in practice, the utility of personas on teams varies from team to team. There is still widespread skepticism when it comes to using personas and while some development groups will accept them readily and find them useful, others will continue to be skeptical and make little use of them.
Unfortunately there is also still a lack of hard scientific data for the success of personas and very little research into the field exists to date. This lack of research makes it doubly difficult to ‘sell’ the benefits of personas to the skeptics and indeed to some clients.
Conclusions
It is my personal belief that personas are useful in many ways, not least as a sanity check of the target audience with project stakeholders. I think it is invaluable to have a constant reminder of who we are creating the product for and to continually remind ourselves who our users are. Yes, they may be ficticious and yes, they may rely on abstract consumer data, but their presence is nevertheless valuable.