Personas, personas, personas!
At the core of the human-centered design practices we’re accustomed to is the idea of personas. These design artifacts lie one step of refinement beyond people portraits (see Andrew’s last post ‘How We Learn from Interviews’ — https://medium.com/cuahsi-scope/how-we-learn-from-interviews-abb4bca72d56), and will serve as a very important reference to inform all design decisions down the line.
The Nielsen Norman Group definition of personas does a good job at capturing the core idea of developing personas.—
“A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. A persona is an archetype instead of an actual living human, but personas should be described as if they were real people… They foster empathy for the specific users we are designing for, and help us break away from the attempt to design for everyone.”
It’s important to note the distinction between personas and user groups or market segments. User groups may be based in statistics and quantitative data, and ranges must be used to summarize attributes of the entire group. More often than not, this data ends up being impersonal, and is very difficult to engage with in making design decisions. In contrast, a persona represents a singular fictional user derived from these ranges to draw attention to important features and attributes of the group. Personas incorporate narratives that bring life to the user, including background information, values, motivations, desires, and quotes. These personal artifacts are more memorable, and can more easily and fluidly be incorporated into future design work.
So what goes into a persona? Again, the Nielsen Norman Group guide to personas comes in handy —
“Common pieces of information to include are:
- Name, age, gender, and a photo
- Tag line describing what they do in “real life”; avoid getting too witty, as doing so may taint the persona as being too fun and not a useful tool
- Experience level in the area of your product or service
- Context for how they would interact with your product: Through choice or required by their job? How often would they use it? Do they typically use a desktop computer to access it, or their phone or other device?
- Goals and concerns when they perform relevant tasks: speed, accuracy, thoroughness, or any other needs that may factor into their usage
- Quotes to sum up the persona’s attitude”
These components should come together to form a believable, live person. Perhaps the most important benefit of using personas is that they create among the team an agreed upon vocabulary to describe different users. In our meetings, our personas and their identities will now serve as shorthand for the set of attributes, values, and motivations we’ve settled on in developing them. Instead of vaguely referencing what ‘users’ want and trying to make convincing design decisions on this nebulous idea, we can refer to our principles and feel confident that our decisions are grounded in people. Moreover, we can remove personal opinions from discussions, instead relying on the personas as ground truth.
At this point, we’ve created an initial set of personas that we feel is well on the way to providing an accurate representation of our users. Stay tuned for our next post introducing these personas!
Edit: These personas are now available as images in our Design Frameworks Digitized post.
