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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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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"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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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.

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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.

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Adele Revella runs a blog for marketers called Buyer Persona Blog. It's worth a look.

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Leisa Reichelt defends personas and explains how she uses them. She makes many good points, though I disagree that personas should represent edge-case users. Too often we spend too much time focused on edge cases, resulting in user experiences that are optimized for 5% of our audience rather than the 95% that represent typical uses.

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Interested in hearing me blather on about personas? Jared Spool has graciously invited me to give a virtual seminar on the topic on May 24. Learn more.

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Take a look at Andrew Hinton's wise words on "Personas: less method, more mindset." I like this bit:

"Essentially, personas aren’t a method that you follow step by step and end up, automagically, with a reference-facsimile of your user. It’s really an emotional, almost theatrical leap that takes imagination and deliberate, focused empathy."

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Ever want a quick explanation of the difference between personas and traditional segmentation used by marketing? Check out my article on iMedia Connection: "Create and Satisfy Demand: Two Tools to Complete the Marketing Loop."

An excerpt:

In essence, market segments answer the "Who" and "What" questions: Who do you target, what products or services do they need, what are they likely to purchase and at what price point, what marketing programs can successfully reach them, and so on.

Once you know what your product is, personas help you answer the questions of "Why" and "How." Why does this product or service make sense to your target audience? Why do the people represented in this audience need it, and why will they use it? How should we structure and design it to satisfy how people will be using it? How do we make sure the site gives people the experience they need and the business results we need?

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I was lucky enough to attend SXSW Interactive this year, and one of the many panels I looked forward to was "Why We Should Ignore Users." I always enjoy a good provocative discussion.

And it certainly was. Actually, much of it was quite reasonable, except for the sadly mistaken Robert Hoekman, who insisted that user research is a waste of time. Why talk with users when you can simply make good design decisions based on your own experience? You can't just ask users what they want and then do that, because users aren't necessarily good at telling you what's best. And you shouldn't waste time creating demographic profiles of users that don't help you make better decisions.

I made a question-that's-really-a-comment toward the end, recommending that Robert fire whatever user researchers he's worked with previously. If he thinks user research consists of simply asking users what they want and then impementing that, then he's been robbed of intelligent peers. If he thinks personas are merely demographic profiles, then he's missing the point about personas. If user research and personas haven't worked for you in the past, maybe it's time to fix them. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There did seem to be a persona backlash in the crowd, I think because the trend in our Web 2.0 universe is to move fast, design for ourselves, and be as agile as possible. While that approach can work, I fear that too often it takes us in the wrong direction. It's very easy to move fast if you don't care what direction you're headed.

My favorite moment was the final comment from Jeremy Kriegel, a former colleague. He referred to the novel Crime and Punishment and the protagonist's perception that there were some people who lived above the law because of their supreme intelligence. Jeremy noted that this is easy to apply to web site creation, where some people consider themselves above the need for understanding users. As Jeremy looks around the web, he sees many web sites created by people who think they are these kinds of geniuses. And yet when one evaluates the resulting sites, it's clear that, well, they're not. Jeremy's question was this: How do I know if I'm one of those people?

You don't.

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I'm delighted that Liz Danzico of Boxes and Arrows, one of my favorite reads, interviewed me about the book in "Long Live the User (Persona): Talking with Steve Mulder." You can also download pretty much the entirety of Chapter 3: Approaches to Creating Personas.

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Over on the UIE blog, Jared Spool asks, "When Should You Use Personas?" He makes a good point that personas are essential when you're working as part of a team. If it's just you in a dark room building a web site, you're unlikely to argue with yourself about who you're serving and how you should go about it. Personas help build consensus when people with varying opinions come together to work.

Make sure to read Dave (Heller) Malouf's comment as well. Smaht man.

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I've been getting a few requests for the slides from my presentation at Web Design World and Web Builder 2.0. Download the zipped PowerPoint file (huge at 23MB).

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I like what Leigh Duncan has to say about the benefits of personas in this MarketingProfs article and in her follow-up blog post. One of the points she makes is that many companies become so focused on the tasks for improving the site that they forget about users. Meetings about action items "fall flat in rallying the troops because in the end, they're about tasks, not about the customer. They fail to unite individuals around real people and a common set of goals that will help service those people, and instead focus individuals on operational activity."

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Holly Buchanan has some wise words on a fundamental truth: Understanding users' intent (why they behave like they do) is critical to knowing how to serve them better. She talks about personas as "representations of your customer base that you can use to model persuasive systems that address the why of customer behavior."

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If you want to hear me blather on about personas, check out Web Design World, coming up December 11-12 in my hometown of Boston. I'll also be doing sessions on Web 2.0 (who isn't these days?) and on a rich Internet project I've been working on recently.

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Dirk Knemeyer brings together two topics I love and the resulting essay is thought provoking. He's absolutely right when he says that personas can be dangerous when they're too shallow. If personas don't document what people really need from our site and how they behave online - if they're merely bulleted lists of demographics that tell us nothing about how people actually use the site - then at best they aren't helpful, and at worst they can mislead. This is why actual contact (!) with users is so important. You can't bluff your way through creating personas, or it will come back to bite you.

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