Personas
What are they?
A persona is a realistic character sketch representing one segment of the targeted audience. Personas summarize user research findings and bring that research to life in a such a way that everyone can make better decisions based on real users, not themselves. Personas create a shared vision for exactly whom you’re designing and what they want.
Who uses them?
All Stakeholders use the Grid to visualize the entire scope of the project, including present and future features, how tasks are related, and how tasks extend across multiple user segments.
Marketing and business analysts can clarify the major segments in a market, see goals that are most important and understand the benefits to each audience.
Business and systems analysts can better understand what activities will be supported and how to support them.
User experience teams use them to structure the system, and collaborate with analysts on developing key scenarios that will guide the system design.
Visual designers can determine what interaction methods would be most accessible and what effects would be most appealing.
The development team uses the scenarios to understand how to prioritize feature development, and understand how to more comprehensively meet users’ needs.
How It Works
- Conduct qualitative research. User interviews, field studies and usability testing are used to gather data on actual users.
- If possible, do quantitative research. Do user surveys and study web site statistics.
- Group users based on cluster analysis. Based on the resulting information, cluster users into segments.
- Create a persona from each segment. Build each segment into a single user with a name, profile, goals and objectives and personal information.
Getting More Information
This post is an edited extract from Leah Buley’s site IA One Sheeters with contributions from Tom Dell’Aringa. I am using the One Sheeter concepts here to showcase what I do as an IA and show examples of my work.
