I recently participated in a UIE webinar on personas. The presenter was Steve Mulder, consultant for Molecular, and author of The User is Always Right. Here are some of my take-aways.



DEFINING
A persona is:

• A realistic character sketch


• An archetype to represent your users


• Based on research


• Defined by goals and attitudes

Benefits of personas:

1. Bring focus to team and organization
   Rather than trying to please all users, your organization can focus on primary and secondary users through identified personas


2. Help build empathy
   Personas have “real” names and photos, making them seem like real people. It’s easier to relate to a persona than a spreadsheet of stats.


3. Encourage consensus
   It’s simple - Would our persona named Carol like feature X?


4. Create efficiency
   When making decisions, your team doesn’t need loose time rehashing stats, user testing, etc. Just refer to the personas, which are based on all of your research.


5. Lead to better decision-making
   See 1-4.

RESEARCHING
Why both field studies and stats analysis? What people say is not always what they do.
Steve told a great story about an electronic company who did tons of research, focus groups and user testing for a boom box they planned to sell. They had narrowed the colors for this boom box down to yellow or black. Their focus groups finally came to agreement on yellow. Their audience was saying, “Yes, the boom box should definitely be yellow. It’s vibrant and energetic!” When the focus groups were done, each person was rewarded with a boom box. On the way out they could choose a yellow boom box or a black boom box. They all chose black.

Field Studies – what users say
Based on field studies like user interviews, user testing, and focus groups, you can glean information regarding:

• Goals
  What are people trying to do on your site?


• Behaviors
  How often do they go to your site?
  What other sites are they looking at?
  What sections do they visit most often?


• Attitudes
  What is there perception of your organization?
  How much domain knowledge do they have?

Stats – what users do
Because people do not always do what they say, you should also review the site traffic stats. These stats will allow you to back up the personas with hard data. Helpful items to review: entry pages, exit pages, common paths, feature usage, search terms, conversion rate, duration, and frequency

CREATING
You’ll create a couple of different personas. When defining your different personas, focus on key differentiators (examples: job, experience in the domain, etc).

The actual document should be one page and include:

• name for the persona


• photo for the persona (preferably not a stock image)


• quote from persona


• personal information (age, job, hobbies, personality)


• business objectives as they apply to the persona (what do we want the user to do)


• user goals (why the user comes to the site)


• persona priority (primary, secondary)

USING
As your organization moves forward and makes decisions, you can always check them against your identified personas.

Use personas when considering:

• Business strategy


• Features and functionality
  Prioritize what you build for users


• Content development
  Write articles, instructional text, and error messages in language that your personas would understand


• Usability Testing
  Recruit based on personas