Personas Demystified

PART 1: INTRO TO PERSONAS

with Frank Spillers, MS

Experience Dynamics 5-part Web Seminar Series

Agenda

Part 1: Intro to Personas

Date: Wed, April 2nd

Time: 10:00am - 11:00am PST

1. History of Personas

2. What are Personas?

3. How are they used?

4. Should you be using personas?

Frank Spillers, MS

1. History of Personas

Shifting to Human Centered

Personas go mainstream

• Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

• Alan Cooper, The Inmates are running the asylum

• Forrester Research (Persona reports)

• Personas “bible” published 2005

How popular are personas?

"More than half of the companies we surveyed are using, piloting, or considering personas."

Forrester Research TechStrategy Report: December 2003

At issue: Effective use

“Though increasingly popular, personas remain widely misunderstood. Successful efforts key off of actual user behaviors, read like a story about a real person, and get used by everyone”.

The Power of Design Personas, Forrester 12/03

>> Base your personas on real-world data

Personas Describe Behavior

Market Research

Behavioral Research

2. What are Personas?

What are Personas?

Personas are a way to make concrete the abstraction inherent in the way you typically refer to, and think about “the customer”.

Personas help you understand:

• Who you are designing for

• What they want to do most

• What steps your users want to take

• What priorities your users have

• What is important to your audience

• Things you did not know about your users

What are Personas?

• NOT real people

• NOT made-up generalizations

• NOT customer segments

They ARE factual representations of:

• User “types”

Capturing behaviors for the purpose of:– Understanding more deeply user needs– Targeting specific audiences– Guiding a user-centered design– Optimizing navigation & content to probabilities– Prioritizing design decisions

Scenario,then use case

3. How are they used?

Adopt Scenario Design

• Who are your users?

• What are their goals?

• How can users achieve their goals?

Sept 2002, Forrester Research “Focus on Customer Experience not CRM”

Personas to Segment

Personas for Advertising

Personas for Marketing

Personas for Engagement

Personas for Future Pacing

http://www.vodafone.com/flash/futures

4. Should you be using personas?

“Create a shared understanding of customers and their goals by embracing personas….

Personas get you cross-company buy-in on who the most important customer segments are and what they want and need, which in turn provides an instant litmus test for whether you're making good design decisions or bad ones”.

Forrester’s Harley Manning

Personal Interview for NewsFactor.com article, Nov 04

This is the thing to do if you do nothing else.

Why Qualitative research?

“Qualitative research, unlike it’s quantitative counterparts challenges internally held assumptions, knowings and thinkings. It delves deeper into the problem-solving, decision making and sense-making structures that cause people to do what they do. Qualitative insights help justify priorities and needs, thus aligning requirements to real world scenarios”.

-Frank Spillers, MS

What would happen if you did?

• Authenticate marketing profiles

• Isolate customer behavior/roles

• Avoid design of edge-cases

• Serve the needs of 80/20

• Get cross-company buy-in

• Help design decisions focus on the end user

Reading

5-part Web Seminar Series

Thank You!

See: www.ExperienceDynamics.com/training for parts 2-5