Came Form : Greek for 'mask'
The concept of the persona was first introduced in 1988 in Alan Cooper's book Inmates Are Running the Asylum. The persona is not a method developed for research purposes — it's a practice-driven method. Thanks to its distinctive power, it gained growing popularity in software development and interaction design from the 1990s on.
In 1983, Alan Cooper was working on the development-support program Plan*It with a woman named Kathy, who was running the project management at the time. He took to imitating Kathy's role and behavior to make decisions during the development of functionality and interaction design. It got a good reaction, and later — when he developed a visual programming language called 'Ruby' — he built a fictional character based on an actual IT-operations manager named 'Ruby' and used it the same way.
In 1995, while doing interaction design for Sagent's customers, he created personas with specific purposes — 'Chuck,' 'Cynthia,' and 'Rob' — and used them to pattern and describe different users.
Every leading IT company — Amazon, Microsoft, ASP, NYT — is innovating with personas. — USA Today, Feb 2005
Persona is
A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design — Kim Goodwin, Alan Cooper
: A persona is a user archetype that helps guide decisions on everything from project features, navigation, and interactions through to visual design.
A persona is not a real person… they are hypothetical archetypes of actual users… defined with significant rigor and precision — Alan Cooper
: A persona is not a real person; it's a hypothetical archetype of an actual user. It must be defined with weight, rigor, and precision.
Personas are a representative behavior and activity profile for a customer base. (A pretend person who represents a type or group of users)
: A persona is a behavioral profile, a representation of behaviors. (Pretending to be a person who stands in for a group of users.)
Benefits
Who tells you who the user is,
What tells you what the user wants and does,
Why tells you why the user uses the service — their motivations for buying, wearing, visiting, and so on —
How tells you how the user will apply the service within the context or background of their life.
The team can share the user's Goal and Needs as common-ground issues.
User-Centered design becomes possible.
Design effort can be prioritized around the persona.
Disagreements about design decisions can be referred back to the persona and sorted out. (Qualitative, narrative, and visual portrayal* lets you know the user's character.)
Designs can be evaluated again and again against the persona, and made better through usability testing.
Viewing users from a deeper angle, you can see them as target market segments.
It can replace dry statistics and long-winded descriptions.
Types
Primary persona
The most important user group, the target of the interface design.
If you design around a different persona, the Primary persona won't be satisfied; but a design that satisfies the Primary persona can also satisfy the other personas.
Secondary persona
Has additional, specific needs. Without getting in the way of the Primary persona's needs, the Secondary persona's extra needs must also be met.
Supplemental persona
By satisfying the needs of the Primary and Secondary personas, the needs of the Supplemental persona are also fully met. Political personas fall in here too.
Customer persona
Treated at a level similar to the Secondary persona. For enterprise products, the Customer persona can sometimes be especially important.
Negative persona
Users to avoid when designing the product — makes explicit which aspects must never be taken into account during design.
An effective communication tool for getting executives and the development team on the same page — early adopters, IT-department managers.
Method
Job Role =? JTBD
Splitting by user role; can be used in B2B and intranet projects.
Can be used in B2B or intranet projects.
Brand Preference
Modeling the buying process as a persona, or using a persona in brand strategy, consumer marketing, and so on (Cooper himself excluded this). Modeling the buying process as a persona, or using a persona in brand strategy, consumer marketing, etc. (Cooper's approach excludes this one.)
Task Mind-set =? Goal-directed design = Design-driven persona
A persona centered on a specific goal or mindset. Cooper's persona emphasizes the 'whole human,' but in actual persona work you sometimes end up emphasizing a specific state.
Data-driven persona
Divided along market segments; modeled from statistics or research data.
Rapid Persona
Used in the field when you need a flexible persona in a short amount of time.
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Market segmentation
The average user doesn't exist — in personas, there is no such thing as an average user.
~ Written by: Service Design Team 4 | 2013.02
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Rapid Persona
A simplified method that skips the interview-data analysis of the full persona process so you can derive a hypothetical user model in a short amount of time.
1. Guideline
1. Recruit hypothetical users.
2. Share the purpose of the service with them.
3. Brainstorm around the persona.
Find important clues in the background data.
(market reports, trend reports, qualitative and quantitative user research, and so on)
4. Put post-its up on the Affinity Wall.
Surface ideas about the user (age, occupation, gender, motivation) and organize as you go. To make intent clear, it helps to add a short explanation as you write. Break out important user categories with their own labels.
5. Build an Affinity Diagram.
Assimilate the ideas. Group them under the important user-category labels.
6. Write the top-level notes.
Write a summary note for each group. The top note should be something that can wrap up what's in the group.
7. Check each group one more time and rearrange the overall structure.
8. Derive personas from the organized groups.
Using a persona matrix, derive a Primary Persona and Secondary Persona, then get feedback. If any critical issues come up, adjust.
2. Checklist
1. Does the finely categorized user represent a user group that matters for the product or service design?
2. Does the finely categorized user represent a user group that matters for the product or service's business success?
3. Does each sub-category have a clearly distinguishing difference from the others?
3. Matrix
Personas can be divided by frequency of use, market size, potential purchasing power, or strategic importance.
4. Format
1. Traits
Name, image (photo), age, gender, short description
2. Goals
The purpose of using the product or service, needs, and behavior are important grounds.
3. Role
Current job and work, responsibilities, and specific activities (leisure, hobbies, etc.).
4. Related market — include the nature and size of the market for the product or service.
5. Proficiency
Design standards may differ by knowledge level or familiarity, so always take this into account. It can include how long the user has been using digital services/products, degree of computer or internet use, and so on.
6. Usage context
Humanizing the persona so it feels like a real person — the background story around the persona's work or daily life.
7. Personality, generation, lifestyle
Stories about the user's personality traits, attitudes, and the kinds of values they hold.
8. Other
Any emotional needs the user has.
~ Written by: Choi Ga-young | Service Design Team 4 | 2013.02
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process
1. Distinguish behavioral variables
— Consider activities / attitudes / aptitudes / motivations / skills — Assign about 15–30 variables per role
2. Map interview data onto the behavioral variables
— Chart each interviewee's position on each behavioral variable
— The participants' positions relative to each other matter more than the absolute values of the variables
— Behavioral patterns among similar groups of users start to emerge
3. Surface key behavioral patterns
— Find users who always cluster together across 6–8 behavioral variables
— Extract 2–3 major behavioral patterns
— If the types fragment too much, that variable isn't giving useful insight for target classification
4. Catalog attributes and goals
— Set 3–5 ultimate goals per persona
5. Review the whole set of personas
6. Write detailed descriptions around behavioral patterns and main traits
— Keep the description concise — under two pages
— Building an image collage is also a good technique
7. Select the persona types
— Primary Persona
— Secondary Persona
— Supplemental Persona
— Customer Persona
— Served Persona
— Negative Persona
* Examples
~ Written by: Service Design Team 4 | 2013.02
