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Personas that change the way you think
Gundega Lazdāne CBAP, Business analysis team lead at FMS, Latvia
Armands Ķirītis, Msc. Comp, Product owner at FMS, Latvia
Agenda
• Who are persons
• Who are Personas
• How to create Personas
• How to use Personas
• A practical example by Armands Ķirītis
Gundega Lazdāne, CBAP
• Ing. Sc. Masters degree
• 15 years in Business Analysis
• BA team lead at FMS
• President of Latvia IIBA® chapter
Armands Ķirītis
• Masters degree in Computer Science – Information Systems
• 6+ years experience as a Business Analyst
• Product owner at FMS
• One of the largest software companies in Latvia complying ISO 9001:2009
• ERP system Horizon, System integration, BI
• R&D laboratory
Who are persons?
• Linda Miller
• 29 years old
• Married, has no children
• Loves to travel
• Works as accountant
• Bill Johnson
• 58 years old
• Married, has 2 children and 6 grandchildren
• Loves to play poker
• Works as accountant
Who are persons?
• Actor
• Accountant
Who are we developing to?
• Some groups of people who have similar set of tasks
Who do we understand better?
Accountants in general
Real people who have a job as accountant
Who do we understand better?
Accountants in general
Real people who have a job as an
accountant
Why then do we make products for abstract user groups?
Let’s make products for
real persons
Challenge:
• All people aren’t similar – if we create a product based on requirements of a few users, others won’t like it
Solution:
• Personas – real people alike archetypes that are based on real-world data about user groups
About Personas
“The inmates are running the asylum”, 1998
Alan Cooper
Who are Personas?
• Personas look like real persons
• Personas are not real persons
• Personas are created based on motivation and behavior of real people
• Personas are created using data collected from real people by observing and exploring
Personas as well as persons have
• Photo
• Biography
• Social situation
• Dreams and personal aims
… this creates empathy.
Name
Demographic information
Motivation
Aims
Behavior
Personas as well as persons have
• Photo
• Biography
• Social situation
• Dreams and personal aims
… this creates empathy.
Name
Demographic information
Motivation
Aims
Behavior
Empathy is the ability to
understand and share another person’s feelings
4 steps creating Persona
1. Identify and fill atributes
2. Focus on goals not activities
3. Identify behavior patterns
4. Expand description
Step 1: Identify and fill attributes
Activities Attitude Aptitude
Motivation Skills
Step 2: Focus on goals not features
Step 3: Identify behavior patterns
Step 4: Expand description
How to use Personas
• To communicate requirements in a team
• To specify product behavior
• To evaluate interfaces
• For marketing purposes
The Horizon WEB 2.0
Persona based improvement
• The most popular ERP system in Latvia
– About 30% of the market,
– About 80% of the public sector
• Desktop application
• 1500 clients (public and private sector)
• More than 20 years of development
Horizon WEB
• WEB counterpart of the Horizon system
• Self-service for employees
• Some specific usages for operators covered
History of Horizon WEB
• Was developed to make some functions more accessible via WEB interface
• The functionality is expanded over time
The problem
• 20+ years of experience with ERP that is meant for advanced users
• Implementing the WEB product in similar style and interface as desktop Horizon
• Users aren’t always happy with the UI/UX of the system as it is more document oriented than user oriented
The job to do
• Find a method that allows us to transform the system from document-focused to user-focused
• Utilize that method
• Improve the UX by remaking the product
The preparation
• Goals
• Planning
• Generating ideas
• Kick-off
• Tasks
• Methods
The Personas – why?
• Several authors recommend this method as very user-centric, for example, Scott Klemmer, Marty Cagan
• Good feedback from practitioners
Our approach
• We have a lot of information about our users:
– Regular seminars and meetings
– Client requests online
– Other ways to get feedback
• This information: the basis for creating Personas
• Additional interviews for extra info and observation
Creating a list of behavioral variables
Activities
• Office based or mobile
• Percentage of activities in product domain
• Few or many parallel tasks
Attitudes • Attitude towards information systems
• Attitude towards electronic devices
Aptitudes • Education level
• Additional courses taken
Motivations
• Salary level
• Enthusiastic about work
• Workload
Skills • Computer user skills
• Communication skills
The job roles
• Choosing the relevant job roles that we build Horizon WEB for (and the ones we don’t build for)
CEO Nurse HR
manager Clerk
Continuing the work
• Process information about the subjects – chosen from various job roles
• Investigating the variable values for those roles
• Creating behavioral patterns for the roles
Synthesizing characteristics and goals
• Creating a table containing our behavioral patterns and bullet points of the characteristics and goals
Checking for redundancy and completeness
• As the roles were planned in order to be distinct, we didn’t find any redundancy
• By additional interviews found some roles missing
• Added the information about the missing roles and their behavioral patterns
Expanding description of attributes
• Adding a description about the person, a narrative
• Still containing the bullet points for completeness – a combination of both narration and structure
• A photo found in the Internet that describes the person
Assigning the persona types
• Positive personas: primary, secondary, supplemental
• Negative personas
The problem of scope
• We determined 2 primary personas
• Split the scope in two separate functional areas
Horizon WEB
Self service system
Operator’s station
Reassigning the persona types
• Splitting the persona types to both self-service and operator’s station
• Several personas are excluded from the scope of operator’s stations as they do not use this functionality
• Some personas are added as negative persons for the self-service area as they do not fit the user we’re building the self-service system for
Expanded: John the seller
• One of the described Personas: John the seller
The requirements
• Writing context scenarios for the primary and some of the secondary personas
• Their typical workday involving the usage of Horizon WEB
• Defining the requirements for improvements
The implementation
• The Horizon WEB 2.0
– New focus – the user
– New technology (WEB forms --> MVC)
• The system is modular: implementing the changes in one module at a time
The benefits
• We had a set of characteristics for the people we build the product for
• Terminology change: we develop for the personas who have names (empathy)
• The priorities of requirements are defined by the persona they’re derived from
The benefits
• User testing: we can do user testing from the viewpoint of a persona without involving real users at first
• Personas can also be used for creating marketing material
Our results
• The first round changes in first specific module: Document Circulation are already implemented and delivered to our clients
• We did:
– User testing
– Surveys
– Analysis of usage logs
Before… Circulation of a vacation request
After the remake
Further perspective
• Remaking other modules in the same way
• The personas are reusable for future projects thus making them a good tool for long term product development
Pros and challenges
• Better understanding of end users
• The personas can be used as a communication tool in the team
• The method brings results
• More analysis has to be done at first
• The thinking and development principles have to be changed
Reading & learning suggestions
• Alan Cooper: About Face 3, http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111
• Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt: The Essential Persona Lifecycle http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Persona-Lifecycle-Building/dp/0123814189
• Chris Nodder, Lynda.com course “UX Design Techniques: Creating Personas” http://www.lynda.com/Web-User-Experience-tutorials/UX-Design-Techniques-Creating-Personas/144082-2.html
• Scott Klemmer: Human-Computer Interaction, course in Coursera, started on 30.06.2014., https://www.coursera.org/course/hciucsd
Thank you for your attention