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RE: Are you using personas?

Subject: RE: Are you using personas?
From: "Heather Searl" <heatherlsearl -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:33:57 +0000


Yes, we are using personas!

We are nearing the completion of our first project where personas have been used throughout the development process -- hardware, software and documentation.

We developed these personas in a fairly Alan Cooper'esque manner. We put together our assumptions about our users and then went out and interviewed a bunch of users using some pretty structured ethnographic interviewing techniques. We then put together personas that are composites of all of the similarities of the different user types we saw. In the end we have a very clear picture of the "norm" for the different roles. We know what they do, what software they are comfortable with, aspects of their job that are common from company to company what their goals are, and what their problems are. We tried these out on internal and external experts to make sure they rang true.

The end result was a small set of personas, a primary persona that is the "person" that everything is being designed for, a couple of secondary personas, whom we try to accommodate in the design as long as it does not compromise the needs of the primary, and an anti-persona who is the person we are not designing for. In our case the anti-persona represents a user segment we expected to see but that we couldn't find when we went out in the real world to talk to people.

We are following this up with usability testing and design "check-ins" with various users (some who were and some who were not part of the original study) to make sure our development effort is on track. So far the feedback has been fantastic.

From the documentation point of view, we have always used audience and task
analysis. All of the personas fall into the "roles" we created and used before but the personas go a step further. Previously one SME could say that the users need X and someone else would say, no they need Y and they could both justify it by interpreting the role we had defined.

Now we say, "Does "Joseph" need it?" The persona feels very real; it is hard to argue against and eliminates edge cases.

We write about some pretty sophisticated equipment and software and our user's vary from extremely educated industry gurus to technicians who have a college diploma.

The primary person for this product is a composite of the "guru" users we met in our research because that represents most of the people that will be using this particular product. Based on our research, we know that this segment of our user-base has a bit of an ego and knows they are good at what they do. They need some pretty sophisticated information that will go right over the heads of lesser mortals, but they will not likely look at a manual or help file, they won't admit to not knowing this basic information and feel looking at manuals is a waste of time. However, they are usually also responsible for training more junior staff, and really want them to be up and running fast so the guru can return to their own work. One of the secondary personas is the junior person who has not spent years in specialized research with our type of product. He wants to prove he knows the job and doesn't want to show any ignorance by asking too many questions.

So, we designed a documentation set that is for the more junior people. It focuses on the basics and skips the detailed complex tasks. We are investigating other ways to provide the more detailed complex information -- ways that will be palatable to the primary persona (webinars with other industry gurus, professional papers, exclusive, monitored chat rooms are a few ideas we have). We are meeting the needs of our primary and secondary persona with the documentation, and we are actually producing less documentation because we can target it very clearly.

Heather


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