The Essential Persona Lifecycle

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The Essential Persona Lifecycle Your Guide to Building and Using Personas

Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDONNEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO

SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYOMorgan Kaufmann Publishers is an imprint of Elsevier

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This book is dedicated to the hundreds of brave souls who have participated in our workshops and worked with us as clients or colleagues over the past 10 years. Your creativity

and experiences helped us build this process, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and we both adore our families and friends. Your support (and patience) mean the world to us.

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CONTENTS

About the Authors ....................................................................................................... ix

CHAPTER 1 What are personas? ................................................................................ 1 Introduction ............................................................................................1Why a persona lifecycle? .........................................................................1Why another persona lifecycle book? ........................................................4What additional materials will I fi nd in the original persona lifecycle book? .... 4

CHAPTER 2 The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle .................................................. 7 Introduction ............................................................................................7The persona lifecycle encourages and supports user-centered design .........8

CHAPTER 3 Persona family planning ........................................................................ 11 What is family planning for personas? ....................................................11Organizational introspection: Are personas right for your project? .............11Step 1. Build a core team ......................................................................12Step 2. Identify goals ............................................................................12Step 3. Create an action plan ................................................................14Step 4. Get your hands on some data ....................................................14Get ready for conception and gestation! ..................................................17

CHAPTER 4 Persona conception and gestation ........................................................ 19 What is the conception and gestation process for personas? ...................20The six-step conception and gestation process .......................................21How long does the conception and gestation process take? .....................23How many personas should you create? .................................................23Persona conception: Steps 1, 2, and 3 ...................................................25Persona gestation: Steps 4, 5, and 6 .....................................................51How to know you are ready for birth and maturation ................................79Summary .............................................................................................80

CHAPTER 5 Persona birth and maturation ................................................................ 81 What is birth and maturation for personas? ............................................82Step 1. Prepare for birth and beyond ......................................................82Step 2. Birth ........................................................................................88Step 3. Maturation ................................................................................93Persona artifacts (the what and how of communicating your personas) .............................................................................................95If you are a consultant .........................................................................112Summary ...........................................................................................113

CHAPTER 6 Persona adulthood .............................................................................. 115 What is adulthood for personas? ..........................................................116What to expect during persona adulthood .............................................116Job 1: Help your personas settle in ......................................................117Start with the basics: Invite personas into your offi ces and into your meetings ............................................................................................118Plan, design, evaluate, release: How to use personas during the stages of product development ............................................................119

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CONTENTS

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Stage 1. Use personas to plan your product .........................................120Stage 2. Use personas to explore design solutions ...............................130Use personas to help you explore visual design solutions ......................148Adult personas and developers ............................................................150Stage 3. Use personas to evaluate your solutions .................................151Stage 4. Use personas to support the release of your product ...............157Transitioning into lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement ................160Summary ...........................................................................................161

CHAPTER 7 Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement ........................... 163 What are lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement for personas? ......163Step 1. Measure the return on investment of your persona effort ...........164Step 2. Decide how to manage the transition to the next project ............165Summary ...........................................................................................168

APPENDIX A Ad hoc persona example ..................................................................... 171 Company: ACME professional association for CPAs ...............................171Gary getting started ............................................................................171Meet gary ...........................................................................................171

APPENDIX B Data-driven persona example .............................................................. 173 Description .........................................................................................173Tanner’s goals and desires ..................................................................175What does Tanner want from G4kids.com?............................................176Tanner’s computer and internet usage ..................................................176Research report references .................................................................180

APPENDIX C Case study: G4K (games 4 kids) kids’ web portal ................................ 183 Introduction ........................................................................................184G4K persona family planning ...............................................................184The G4K persona team fi nd some much needed data free web-based data sources ......................................................................186G4K persona conception and gestation ................................................189Identifying factoids and transferring them to sticky notes .......................191Assimiliating factoids ..........................................................................192Identifying subcategories of users and creating skeletons ......................194Discussing priorities ............................................................................195Completing the personas .....................................................................197G4K persona birth and maturation .......................................................199G4K persona adulthood .......................................................................201Using personas for competitive analysis ...............................................201Using personas for feature brainstorms ................................................205Creating a persona-weighted feature matrix ...........................................206Using a scenario collection spreadsheet ...............................................206G4K measures the ROI of the persona effort ........................................210Measuring product improvements.........................................................211Measuring process improvements ........................................................212Preparing personas for the next project ................................................213

Bibliography .............................................................................................................215

Index ....................................................................................................................... 217

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Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle, Washington. Tamara’s focus is on … focus! She’s an expert at wrangling executive teams until they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘ in the trenches ’ to design and develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life, Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of Seattle tech startups after getting her Master’s Degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington. Today, she’s happily focusing on practical methods that help business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she’s got her work cut out for her.

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Offi ce 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows (including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design , with Tamara Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry events.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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