Getting multiple persona-ality

Ok, maybe that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but work with me here. In the software development world, a lot of times we talk about who our customers are. Not what kind of pancakes they like, or what they think about rainbows, but what set of characteristics makes them a unique user type.

With almost any software, there are multiple ways it can be used. To help us decide how well a feature fits in a particular product, many times we will develop a persona of who our target user is and how we think they might use our product.

What Exactly Is a Persona?

The almighty Wikipedia says:

Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design.

We deal with personas in my work life all the time, but as I deal with many amateur developers and web designers, I thought it might be valuable to share this technique and maybe get some feedback from readers that have their own unique perspective.

How Do You Build One

The obvious answer is first get to know your customers or users. Who are these people and what do they want and need to do? Watch people use your product. Learn the tendencies and habits of these people. A good place to start would be by reading The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. This book will explain the great detail of some of the ideas I will share next.

The basic concept is this, you imagine. Of course you can back your imagination up with statistics, usability studies and all manner of scientific data, but they key to creating them and using them is imagination. You have to be able to imagine using your product through they eyes of someone else. Someone that might have more limited knowledge or capabilities. Sometimes you might have to imagine someone with much more capability. (for example designing an SDK) The key is being able to suspend what you know, or what you think you know, and imagine your products and ideas through the eyes of who will potentially buy, use and hopefully love your software.

The Benefit

In our work place, the obvious benefit is it allows everyone on the team to know who we are talking about as a user when we say “Bob would definitely want to do this.” We speak of personas as people all of the time where I work. We have all studied and understood who the character is, so we are able to communicate with each other as if the person was a real user. The benefit is that the fake person IS a real person, or better yet in our case, millions of real persons.

Personas are particularly useful at diffusing disagreements about product designs. When you have a group of intelligent, strong willed people, who all believe passionately about what they are working on, sometimes passion overrides logic. Even when someone is very loyal to their particular design idea, it’s easy to explain the negatives through the use of a persona, hopefully without offending the person in the process.

More Practice (Scenarios)

Once you have established strong personas, the next step is to write compelling user scenarios through the eyes of your personas, but that’s a blog for another day.

More Reading:

Persona Development

Scenario Development

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