User personas and my love for R.
The sole purpose of this post was to share with you how very, very bad I am at drawing. Meet Sheila:

But then I decided I wanted to write more. Sheila actually has a very special place in my heart.
Sheila was a provisional persona for a project looking at using technology to help low-income tenants in Chicago navigate legal issues. I’m sure I’ll be documenting a lot about that project on this blog.
We recently ran some validation testing on our prototype for this project. I was really curious to see if we had nailed the persona and whether the product was a fit for that user.
We were running the tests at a legal aid organization’s office. We had given them some parameters around who would qualify as a test participant, and they handled the recruiting. Our day started out with the most wonderful test participant the world has ever known. I’ll call her R.
R walked in and she WAS Sheila. She fit nearly every assumption we had made about Sheila, her life, the issues she’s facing, etc. She also happened to be boisterous, hilarious, and entirely endearing. She teared up and hugged us after the session was through and said she was going to tell all of her friends about it (although the product does not yet exist).
I’m telling you this because it was a situation that never actually happens. We had our user and she was over the moon about the prototype. And we all fell in love with R. The best part, though, is that now we’re building this product for R.
We can forget about creepy bug-eyed Sheila forever.
