Practical Personas

personacreation.com: a new blog to keep an eye on.

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I'll be presenting on user research and personas on May 5 at the Westin Chicago River North. You can save $300 if you use the priority code SPMUL when registering. I've been speaking regularly at Web Design World for about 9 years now, and it's always a good event. Hope you can make it!

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Andrew Hinton has wise things to say about what personas are and aren't in this article on Boxes & Arrows.. He reminds us that personas should not merely be an item in our methodology checklist. If they don't have a real impact on how we make decisions, they're not worth doing.

I love this bit: "Personas are not documents, and they are not the result of a step-by-step method that automagically pops out convenient facsimiles of your users. Personas are actually the designer’s focused act of empathetic imagination, grounded in first-hand user knowledge."

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On Boxes and Arrows, Andrea Wiggins wrote an article a couple of months ago that I somehow missed on using Web analytics data during the persona creation process. In her example, a designer uses Google Analytics to provide real behavioral data for each of the segments or personas that she hardwires into the analytics tool. I absolutely agree with Andrea that behavioral data is critical to a well-rounded portrait of users. It's not enough to just talk with users and hear what they think - watching them (whether qualitatively through field studies or usability testing or quantitatively through Web analytics) is equally important. I like how she extracts data from Web analytics reports to make the personas more real.

The challenge is that the quantitative data could be placed on top of incorrect qualitative personas right from the start. If the personas you invent aren't right, no amount of data on top will help. That's why I'm a fan of the quantitative persona creation process, where data from surveys and Web analytics gets used via statistical analysis to generate the persona segmentation in the first place.

Make sure to read the good discussion after her article.

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Environment Agency (UK) recently won the Gold Award at the inaugural Intranet Innovation Awards, partly because of their use of personas. Watch the team talk about the personas, including how they were created and used.

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A quick review from Ian Lurie. I'm grateful for his closing: "If you're an internet marketer, or involved in internet marketing or development, you need to read this book."

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"Persona-lizing a site" is a decent overview of the value of personas and contains some good stories about their usage and value. Unfortunately, like many articles on personas it's limited to qualitative research. The more companies I work with, the more concern I hear about making critical business decisions based solely on a few interviews or field studies. Without quantitative data to back up our personas, it's no wonder some executives are skeptical that personas can really represent all users. I love that Internet Retailer is covering personas, but I wish they had taken that coverage to the next level.

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