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Benefits of personas
The benefits of creating and using personas are numerous, and very clear once they the technique has been adopted into a production methodology.
- Binds teams together - personas help project team members share a specific, consistent, easy to grasp understanding of who the audience is
- Provides a human face - so as to focus empathy on the needs of the "real" person represented by the persona. In this sense, the process of "getting to know" the persona through shared, collaborative development is almost as important as actually documenting the persona
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Useful resources |
Cooper, A. (1999) The inmates are running the asylum. Sams. 978-0672316494.
Chapman, C.N. & Milham, R. (2006) The personas' new clothes. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, San Francisco, CA.
Pruitt, J. & Adlin, T. (dddd) The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind during product design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman Press.
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Related methods
Ethnography - or scientific anthropology by any other name - is all about collecting qualitative data on human behaviour. But it is not always necessary, as personas can be (and often are) created without access to reams of customer research.
An interesting modern technique is to have stakeholders "role-play" a particular persona whilst stepping through a cognitive walkthrough exercise.
How to do ethnography
Ethnography is, I believe, the basis of good persona generation: therefore, the collection of qualitative data, via focus group interview, is key to the successful emergence of believable, useful personas.
There are many factors that go into planning such ethnographic interviews, but five are crucial:
- Identify a requirements or needs spectrum - you should aim to interview types of people whose needs you expect will be different. For example, would you expect the needs of an individual contributor to be different from those of a manager? Will new employees' behaviour differ much from that of veteran employees, or will employees in the marketing department differ from employees in HR? In a sense, you're forming a hypothesis about who your personas might be. Ideally, interview a broad set of people, because you might find differences you didn't expect.
- Let the designers ask the questions - ideally, the same people who will be doing the design should do the ethnography, because they'll ask better questions. They'll need this kind of contextual information later on. The interviewers don't have to be trained in ethnographic techniques - but it would be good if they were.
- Give yourself time - for relatively simple projects the ethnography will take somewhere between one and two weeks. For more complex projects that figure of one to two weeks may rise to three or four weeks.
- Understand the context - the process of creating personas is based upon ethnography, of course, but before talking to any users, speak with the business stakeholders - the people who are funding the initiative. It's vital to understand the organizational goals, so you can put the user goals in context
- Understand the difference between secondary and primary personas - the primary persona is not a lowest common denominator or a crude amalgam. The aim always is to create someone who is maximally representative of the kind of the person for whom the site will be of interest
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