A Personas Guideline, From What They Are to How To Use
It has been more than a decade since Alan Cooper officially introduced personas in Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity in the 1990s. As long as it is used in various fields such as the UX research and product design process, the original personas concept, as a practical design tool, has been developed by later practitioners even further. But the problem arises — — It becomes complicated for UX beginners or product team members to understand ‘what exactly persona is.’ Just like Lene Nielsen, a Denmark’s leading specialist in personas, says:
“ …Despite the fact that a vast number of articles about using personas have been written, there is no unilateral understanding of the application of the method nor a definition of what a persona description is. ”
This article aims to give a start point for the UX beginners who are eager to know about personas. The picture of personas may be more concrete by answering these questions below in this story:
- What are personas? The definition of persona
- Why creating personas is so important?
- How many different types of personas will we see?
- What’s the process for building personas?
- How to use personas?
This story’s information is based on Alan Cooper, John Pruitt, Tamara Adlin, and Lene Nielsen’s works. The related articles and books about personas also will be introduced at the end of this story. And I hope this article can give you a holistic picture of personas.
1. WHAT ARE PERSONAS?
Many articles have explained personas as fictional characters, a specific, concrete representation of target users. (Pruitt, Adlin, 2006). Even though the description sounds simple, it is still too abstract for many people to understand what personas are and why we use them. To fully understand this concept, I think the best way is to go back to its born.
Alan Cooper, the creator of personas, has talked about how personas were born in his article “The Origin of Persona.” While personas were introduced publicly in 1999, Cooper notes that the genesis of personas was really around 1983 as part of a persona role-playing technique that he used while working through design problems on his own. Later on, Cooper used personas as a tool to persuade his business partners and team members during the design process. As Cooper has mentioned many times, a crucial point to understand personas is that personas do not present a single user but a range of users. Cooper gave an example in The Origin of Persona” :
“Even though the variation among the users was dramatic, a clear pattern emerged after just a few interviews. The users fell into three distinct groups, clearly differentiated by their goals, tasks, and skill levels. Had I been creating the software myself, I would have role-played those users as I had with Ruby and SuperProject, but in this case, I had to describe those user models to the Sagent team. So I created Chuck, Cynthia, and Rob. These three were the first true, Goal-Directed, personas.”
2. WHY PERSONAS ARE IMPORTANT?
In many ways, creating Personas bring a lot of benefits not only for designers but also for the other people who are involved in the entire production process:
- Personas are powerful tools that can be used as a common language to communicate within a team, including stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
- Personas allow designers to focus on a set of specific users and help designers make better decisions.
- Personas make designers easier to relate to real users to explore real needs.
- Personas help designers to measure the effectiveness of the design.
- Personas offer some valuable information for marketing and sales activities.
3. DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE OF PERSONAS
A simple and standard platform for personas does not exist since they depend on what type of products/services you are building in. Just like every tool will be generated over and over, so as personas. Based on Alan Cooper’s conception, many other experts have developed this “design tool” more holistic and powerful.
In this article, when we talk about “different perspectives of personas” or “different types of personas,” we mean the database of building Personas, the methods of using Personas, and the content of Personas, etc. Whatever which personas we are using; the goal always is the same: To create a better experience for users.
According to the Personas — A Simple introduction by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang, there are four personas that you can use to do your work most effectively. They are:
- Goal-directed Personas
- Role-Based Personas
- Engaging Personas
- Fictional Personas
3–1. Goal-directed Personas
The main focus of Goal-directed Personas is the goal of representative users — — a set of users. These kinds of personas will help designers getting a better understanding of users to make significant design decisions. The data to build Goal-directed Personas primarily comes from qualitative research. Ethnographic Research, a combination of immersive observation and directed interview techniques, is a crucial phase of the Goal-Directed Design process. (Alan Cooper, 2014).
3–2. Role-based personas
Grudin and Pruitt are the supporters of Role-based personas(RBPs). They wrote a very great book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, to explain how to build and use personas properly. Unlike goal-directed personas, role-based personas not only focus on users’ goals but also pay close attention to users’ behaviors. RBPs are hugely data-driven and incorporate qualitative and quantitative information, and they are interested in the role of the user inside the organization. We need to obtain answers to the following questions with RBPs:
- Where will users use our product?
- What is the purpose of the product?
- What business objectives are required, and what can be achieved with them?
- Which people will be impacted by their role?
- What kind of functions is being served?
From Hands-On UX Design for Developers by Elvis Canziba
The concept of RBPs started from “user archetypes,” and it is more akin to Geoffrey Moore (i.e., “Target Customer Characterizations”) more than Cooper’s. They disagree that a single method can solve all problems, so the role-based perspective has developed Cooper’s Goal-directed perspective personas even further. According to Grudin and Pruitt, RBPs can be used by almost everyone involved in the product development process ( even the marketing and sales department).
3–3. Engaging Personas
Engaging Personas are proposed by Lene Nielsen and can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas. They are a holistic view of a persona, including social background, psychological characteristics, and emotion. The purpose of engaging a persona description is to avoid seeing users as a stereotype from designers. The persona descriptions balance data and knowledge about real applications and fictitious information intended to evoke empathy, Lene Nielsen says.
3–4. Fictional Personas
Unlike other Personas, fictional personas depend on UX designer’s former experiences instead of user research. It can be used as an initial process for sketching, but we don’t recommend it as a guide for your development process for future products or services.
4. THE PROCESS FOR BUILDING PERSONAS
Depending on the type of personas you want to build, the process will be various. By summarizing Pruitt, Adlin, and Nielsen’s works, there are 5 phases included in this process:
Phase 1: Create a plan
Remember, personas are not a skeleton key. They are unable to solve all types of problems. Personas are just one of the solutions in designers’ toolkit. Sometimes, they can not even guarantee the problem will be solved entirely. You have to measure the problem that you encountered and decide whether you will use personas.
Before you dive into creating personas as your design making tool, here are three key questions that you may want to ask yourself:
- What resources do we have for personas and other UCD activities?
- What product problems do we want to solve with personas?
- What process problems do we want to solve with personas?
Phase 2: Identify Data Sources & Collect Data
Collect sufficient user data from observation, or other high-quality user research is wonderful. The data from a third party is acceptable but is not primary.
Phase 3: Collect Assumptions / Form a hypothesis Persona
The reason for doing this is that everyone in the organization has their assumptions about users. The premises can come from anything from data to personal bias. If we throw these into the public, where they can be discussed and examined, we will get more control of them. (Pruitt el. 2008)
Second, when managers and stakeholders realize that different user assumptions exist, to confirm a target set of the user becomes even more necessary. This action can help them to understand why personas are useful with the product development process.
Phase 4: Head into Persona Creation process
Pruitt and Adlin have recommended a six-step persona conception and gestation process that you can follow for creating personas. For conception and gestation, each of them includes three steps.
The six-step conception and gestation process
Persona creation is a serial and straightforward process in which you summarize, cluster, and analyze the data to discover themes. You use these themes to generate rough persona “skeletons.” You then cull and prioritize the skeletons to focus only on the most important, most appropriate targets. Finally, you enrich skeletons into full personas by making the details concrete and adding personality and a storyline.
John Pruitt, Tamara Adlin The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, P165
It is just a simple explanation of this process above. More details lie in Pruitt and Adlin’s book The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design to explain. (I would highly recommend you to read about it.)
Phase 5: Get ready for birth and maturation
So far, a set of personas should have been created. These personas can be introduced to those team members. But wait, how can we know that the moment is coming? What if these personas are still not perfect?
These signs tell us that we are ready:
- The amount of tweaking and reexamination slows down or stops.
- The foundation document is completed, but we still have a lot of open questions.
- Feel right to the personas
- The stakeholders should agree that no critical audience is missing, and the personas are robust and credible.
5. HOW TO USE PERSONAS
Which stage you are during the production process and who is using personas, these two elements significantly impact how to use them. How to use personas is divided by Pruitt and Adlin into four stages:
5–1. Stage One — Plan your product by using personas
Creating an overall development plan for the product is essential. The personas can be used in this part to “tell their stories.” Because the needs, goals, and contexts are included in the personas, how the product will be used, and the user’s reactions will be clearly drawn out in front of the decision-making layer. Here are two things that you can do regarding this stage:
First, Persona-based approaches for understanding user requirements and envisioning your product:
- Bring personas into storytelling, feature brainstorming, and competitive review to generate ideas about product features.
- By putting personas into motion to evaluate features
Second, Analyze your competition through the eyes of your personas:
- Ask colleagues to act personas. Then Conduct a simple walkthrough of the competitive product with your colleague assuming the point of view of the persona, recording their ideas and observations during this.
- Review the recording to see personas’ act to your competitor’s product and features.
5–2. Stage Two — Use Personas to Explore Design Solutions
After we move on to product design, specific stories (sometimes called scenarios) become an excellent guide during the design process. To understand why prepare scenarios for our personas are useful for our design solutions, we can see how Lene Nielsen described the relationship between them:
“A scenario is a written story that describes the future use of a system or a Web site from a specific, and often fictitious, user’s point-of-view. …You can give each of your personas life by creating scenarios that feature them in the role of a user. Scenarios usually start by placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve., ” — — Lene Nielsen
In other words, when scenario and personas are put together, we can clearly see how the product take impact on our target users. As Pruitt and Adlin mention that scenarios usually are assembled by these:
- A specified person/user
- A certain task or situation
- User’s goal for that task
- A time period
- References to specific features/functionality the user will use.
Especially for the walkthrough scenario, which indicates what exactly the feature is and does. Furthermore, when target users are specific, the layout, color, and style choices are much clearer for visual designers.
5–3. Stage Three — Use Personas to Evaluate your solutions
It’s not the end after the overall product design is completed. Personas can also be used to evaluate whether the designs match the needs of users. We can use the same method mentioned in stage one — how we assess competitor’s products by using the personas to “walk through” the user experiences. (Pruitt and Adlin, 2008)
Not only do personas directly contribute their value to the design process, but also for starting other user researches, such as recruiting profile for usability testing. It can be used for the QA team and testers to create more holistic test cases.
5–4. Stage Four: Use Personas to Support the Release of Your Product
Personas are a common language between the marketing, sales department, and product development department. It perfectly makes up the gap between them ( in many companies, this problem always exists.) By using personas helps these teams understand how a product works and who will be using it. The marketing and sales team can use them as a guide to finding potential customers.
Summary
- Personas as fictional characters, a specific, concrete representation of target users.
- Personas are a common language within a team, and they help designers make better decisions. Personas can be used broadly, including the QA team, the marketing, and the sales department, etc.
- There are four different types of personas that we can use to support our product’s design process. Whatever which one we choose to use. The goal is to build a good user experience.
- Building personas by four phases: Plan, Collect Data, Form Assumptions, and Create Personas.
- Using personas with four steps: Plan, Design, Evaluate, and Release.
Reference
- John Pruitt, & Tamara Adlin. (2006). The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design to explain.
- Alan Cooper. (2008). The Origin of Persona. https://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/05/the_origin_of_personas/
- Rikke Friis Dam, & Teo Yu Siang. (2020). Personas — A Simple Introduction. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them#:~:text=Personas%20are%20fictional%20characters%2C%20which,%2C%20experiences%2C%20behaviours%20and%20goals.
- Lene Nielsen. (n.d.). The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/personas#heading_Four_different_perspectives_page_12414
- Andrew Wilshere. (2017, February 20). User Personas: What Are They And Why Use Them?
- Elvis Canziba. (2018). Hands-On UX Design for Developers
Finally, I want to say that personas are not easy to understand and create. We have to be patient about the process, but the benefits from it will be tremendous. If you want to know more about how to choose an appropriate UX research method, you can look up this article:
