Design Technique 4: Personas
A technique I always try to work into projects are personas. The idea here is to try to get into the heads of a site’s potential users by making them more specific. Identities which are entirely fictitous of course but nonetheless specific to the degree that you might know them as characters. So how do you do that?
Simply identify five or six potential users you expect to visit. Let’s call the first one Mary and we’ll say she lives in Melbourne with her husband Bob, her cat Twinkey and for brevity’s sake she has no children. From there you can try to build the persona out more and more - how are they going to go to the site and what are they going to do? Embellishments such as a penchant for fine chocolate or that they like to walk in the park on Sundays are more than welcome. Perhaps Bob has an opinion about Peanut Butter…
The object is to try to understand the functionality as well as the user profile of significant portions of the expected user base. Yes clients absolutely roll their eyes when you produce six pages of your report (a page per persona) to explain in detail the interactions and life experience of six incredibly interesting but non-existent people! Don’t fear because in the end truth will win out. These artefacts will go a long way to helping you identify the true target audience.
It is important here to note that a major mistake developers make is to simply assume their audience fits a certain profile. Very often the client insists a certain demographic use their site - adamently so! Investigation may surprise you both when you realise there is potential revenue in accomodating other demographics you previously hadn’t identified.
A caveat here is not to lock yourself specifically into targeting any single group. This could be bad by excluding the needs of other market segments. The trick, I think, is to primarily focus on several and ensure they all would find the information they are looking for or functionality expected. People, after all, have different motivations and expectations depending on their computer literacy for example.
None of it is rocket science by a long shot. Give personas a go next time you’re working out your design. Create some imaginary personas to think through the design decisions and more likely than not you’ll discover or realise a few things you otherwise might have overlooked. The problem you’re overcoming is that before doing this you only had a vague unquantified idea of the site users. The trick is to make them as detailed as possible within the confines of a line-and-a-half spaced page.
August 29th, 2007 at 2:18 am
[...] is sometimes a lot to be said for making up little stories. We talked about writing stories with Personas which are a way of identifying major groups of users. We talked about writing Use Cases [...]
September 27th, 2007 at 10:38 am
[...] specifically I found it very difficult to sell the practical benefit of using personas and scenarios to identify user groups and possible interaction for the new project. I agree on the [...]