Introduction to personas: presentation notes from Barcamp

 – posted January 21st, 2007 by Laurence Veale     Comments (8)

Fresh back from Barcamp in Waterford. Great day and some great talks. Kudos to Keith Bohanna, Tom Corcoran and his team at WIT for putting so much work into the day.

I was scheduled to speak at the same time as Bernie Goldbach who pulled a big crowd, leaving me with a slightly reduced audience. However, I was more bothered that I missed Bernie’s talk myself as we’ve been talking about podcasting opportunities in iQ Content. However, I did catch the end of it and Conn’s excellent talk about the practical aspects of producing quality podcasts. I also had a very interesting chat with Eoghan McCabe This guy knows his web design.

Persona presentation notes

The following are the highlights from from my barcamp persona talk.

Know your users

In designing anything, whether it be a product a web site or application it’s really important to know who you’re designing for.

But it’s not the who but the what that’s really important.

Goals

And more importantly, what it is your users want. This can be quite a tough thing to get right and big organisations can often struggle with this concept.

The two main problems with organisations and their users

Often the larger the organisation, the further they are from their users.
The two most common scenarios we see in well established organisations are:

  1. Ignorance: you’ve no idea of who your users are and what they want from your site, not an inkling, not a clue
  2. An embarrassment of riches: you’ve got so much data from so many different sources, sometimes competing but you don’t know how to use it to improve your design

Out of these issues we get two users that we think we’re designing for, the Elastic user and Joe Public, but these are the wrong types of user to design for and I’ll show you why.

Elastic user (persona non grata)

One of the symptoms of not knowing anything useful about our users is that we design for ourselves, or as is often the case, for our boss. The elastic user is very flexible, bending to become the user we want in whatever design position we want to argue for. The elastic user is a great tool for self-referential design, so really, they’re a persona non grata.

Joe Public

Joe Public can be a symptom of too much data. Too much data causes paralysis by analysis: you simply don’t know what to do with it. So, you’re trying to design for everyone and if you design for everyone, you design for no one. And all you get is a mediocre product.

Getting from Joe Public to specific users

So how do you go from the general to the very specific? Well, the answer’s in the question: you have to be specific and being specific is critical to success.

And here’s a “case” study

“Case” Study: designing for specific goals yields excellent results

Take the following design requirements

  • A bag for overnight stays.
  • Needs to be small enough to get on and off an aircraft without any trouble
  • Must be easy to get down an aircraft aisle.
  • Must be stowed in an overhead bin.
  • Want to wheel it rather than carry it along endless airport corridors.

Seeing so many of these bags in an airport you may assume they were designed for us, the general public. In fact, they were developed for a very specific user: air crew.

The important point here is that something built to meet specific user goals has a better chance of being excellent at what it does and as such being truly excellent for everyone.

What do you need to build personas?

One of the design problems I mentioned was paralysis by analysis but data is still key to developing accurate personas. Personas are the end product of a process and I briefly discussed the following:

  • Web analytics (log files & search queries)
  • survey results,
  • user testing,
  • customer & client interviews
  • persona workshops, a service we run for clients, which is a collaborative exercise in which we collate and analyse all the important data with the key stakeholders. This also serves as a great way to communicate how important users are and how, by helping them achieve their goals, you can improve profits/reduce costs etc.

Distilling potential personas using common behaviour

The essential point here is that by focusing on goals you can distil your personas into a more manageable number. I used the example of a County Council planning application. Potentially, there are at least five different users (architects, engineers, developers, builders and homeowners) but these could all be designed for by treating them as one persona, the planning applicant as they all have essentially the same goals and exhibit the same patterns of behaviour.

What does a persona look like?

I finally went on to show what a persona looks like. First off, a nice photo and narrative helps humanise user requirements by taking them out of the typical functional specification document (where they may have once lived as use cases) and placing them where everyone in the organisation can identify with them and easily understand them.

I then went on to discuss the importance of goals and from them how you would start to build your different scenarios and design requirements.

Where are personas used?

I then discussed where personas are really useful

  • Design targets: eliminating the urge for self-referential design and helping to focus on what goals the design needs to cater for.
  • Communication of requirements. Rather than having to read a detailed and verbose specification, everyone can read a persona. By creating posters or laminated cards, it helps to get buy-in throughout the organisation.
  • Evaluations and walk-throughs can be seen as very subjective or based on heuristics that are difficult to communicate to stakeholders. Showing, in simple terms, why something doesn’t work for a user in a certain scenario can be a real penny-dropper.

Reading more on personas

Lastly, I recommended “About Face 2.0, the Essentials of Interaction Design” by Alan Cooper for anyone that wanted to read up more on personas

Categories Barcamp, Spotted, iQ in the news

Comments Open | Trackbacks On | permalink