Practical Personas

Personas for intranets

2008-10-26T16:19:13Z

Although we spend most of the time talking about and using personas for public-facing sites, they are absolutely useful for intranets as well. In fact, they're even easier to create, since we sometimes have easier access to these internal users than to external customers. In addition, intranets can create turf battles even more dangerous and distracting than external sites, because everyone fights even harder for attention. This means that having actionable user knowledge in the form of personas can be even more critical for making tough decisions about what to create and how it should work.

Howard McQueen wrote a nice piece on persona-centric Intranet design that's worth a read. I'm not sure I buy into his creation process, which seems to rely too much on existing stakeholder perspectives and not enough on one-on-one primary research, but I like his idea of selecting a Persona Advocate who is responsible for keeping the personas alive within the organization.

Songwriters using personas

2008-07-29T13:27:42Z

Does the band Coldplay use personas when writing songs? Sounds like it.

Web application for persona creation

2008-07-04T20:00:38Z

PersonaBuilder is a web-based tool built by Tim Smalley that encourages effective creation of personas. It's a very smart interface that helps team members collaborate and provides a shared repository for user research notes and of course the personas themselves. Definitely check it out.

Persona quality scale

2008-06-17T17:38:51Z

Here's a new personas blog by Angela Quail with an excellent idea: When we deliver personas, we should label them with just how much research rigor went into their creation. Many people realize that personas are at least partially "made up." The question that often arises is this: How much of the persona is invented vs. grounded in research? What parts of the persona can I trust for decision making, and what parts are just for flavor?

I like the idea of a scale or some kind of label to let people know what level of research went into each persona. Of course, I see a core distinction between qualitative personas and quantitative personas. Perhaps one metric behind any persona should be the number of actual users that shaped this persona (in interviews, field studies, surveys, etc.).

New personas blog

2008-05-08T20:44:00Z

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

Speaking at Web Design World Chicago

2008-04-02T01:57:01Z

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!

Personas as lived vs. documented

2008-03-21T14:48:10Z

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."

Web analytics data for persona development

2008-01-18T19:13:45Z

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.

Video case study of personas

2007-12-30T15:44:39Z

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.

Another book review

2007-12-01T16:03:05Z

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."

Internet Retailer tells persona stories

2007-11-12T14:25:19Z

"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.

Persona debate at 37signals

2007-11-08T01:59:31Z

37signals posts their distaste for personas and a fun comment war ensues. Whenever I read or hear these debates, I'm always disappointed because too often personas are misrepresented. Good personas aren't fictitious, abstract, or a replacement for user research. Many people live through one bad experience with personas and dismiss them forever. (My first car was a horrible 1976 Olds Starfire, but I didn't assume all cars sucked and I didn't vow never to drive again.)

Sometimes a team gets lucky because they truly are their audience. 37signals creates products that are amazing because they are designing for themselves and many people are just like them. They don't need personas. But most of us don't have that luxury. We don't live and breathe what our users live and breathe, so we need tools to help us gain empathy, understand stated and unstated user needs, and translate that knowledge into action. Personas aren't a panacea, but they can go a long way to helping team members have a shared vision for what the site or product needs to do and how.

When marketers discover personas

2007-10-21T03:46:25Z

It makes me very happy when I see marketers such as M. H. "Mac" McIntosh get excited about the power of personas. Personas are moving beyond their roots in Web design teams, and this is a good thing not only because it encourages more customer-centered thinking, but because it does so in a consistent way across different parts of an organization. One consistent approach to segmenting and serving users translates into a consistent customer experience across all channels and all customer touchpoints, and this very often leads to a better (and thus more profitable) customer relationship.

Book review

2007-09-22T22:18:16Z

Thanks to Will Evans for a very kind review of the book posted to the IxDA mailing list. I'm honored that he considers is among books "that go far beyond principles and theory to ones I can actually extract from and use their contents for the praxis of the craft, rather than just reading descriptions of a process."

Interview with Jared Spool

2007-09-06T21:33:08Z

As a follow-up to a virtual seminar I did a while back, Jared Spool interviewed me for a podcast, which has now been excerpted as part of the UIEtips newsletter. Check out "Making Personas Work for Your Web Site: An Interview with Steve Mulder."