An introduction to personas and how(First)

Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill.
There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution.
This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own. If you want to know more, there are lots of resources available, particularly the work of Alan Cooper and colleagues at Cooper Interaction Design (www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters_personas.asp). Alan is credited with having created the first persona for software development purposes back in the early 1980s.
What are personas?
Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ‘standins’for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design.
Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo.
Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before
they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas.
Personas act as stand-ins for real users
On the next page is a sample persona for an intranet project. This persona describes Bob, a 52 year old mechanic that works for a road service company. From Bob’s persona you can start to get a feel for his goals when using the new intranet. He wants to avoid feeling stupid, would like to retain his status as a mentor to his younger colleagues, whilst seeing the potential of the intranet to make him more informed when interacting with customers.
Benefits of creating personas
Personas enable intranet and website teams to stand in their users’ shoes. They focus the design effort on supporting user goals, rather than being driven by the ideas of team members or senior executives.
Introducing personas into your intranet or website project will bring a number of benefits:
• users‘ goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team
• the team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many
users
• they are relatively quick to develop and replace the need to canvass the whole user community and spend months gathering user requirements
• they help avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use
• design efforts can be prioritised based on the personas
• disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas
• designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, reducing the frequency of large and expensive usability tests.
Personas are not stand-alone
Although personas have many benefits, they alone will not ensure the success of your intranet or website. The goals of the business must also be considered, because if the website or intranet does not meet business needs, then the solution is not a viable one. For example, an intranet may aim to reduce organisational costs and increase staff efficiency, while an ecommerce website aims to make sales.
Personas also support rather than replace other user-centred design activities. There is still a need to conduct task analysis to understand the detailed tasks your intranet or website is to accommodate. There is still value in usability testing the site, and many user-centred design activities are conducted to gather input into the personas, such as user interviewing and observation.
Roadblocks to introducing personas
Introducing personas for the first time is not always a smooth ride. You may come across any one of these objections.
Personas are no different from market segments
Market segmentation is an invaluable tool for identifying the groups of people most likely to use a website and why. However
market segmentation is not designed to provide insight into how the website needs to work and how it is best designed.
Market segmentation might identify that 37% of women aged 25–35 want to book their next holiday online, and that competitive prices and access to quality accommodation will affect their purchasing decision. A persona, on the other hand, would show that Sally aged 27 wants to book her next holiday online, but is concerned that the accommodation she chooses won’t look the same as the brochure, that they won’t be close to restaurants and bars, and that her online booking might not be accepted when she arrives. Sally also wants to be assured that she can cancel her booking 60 days prior to her departure date without penalty.
Market segmentation is a great input into persona development and can help identify the types of users to profile. However it rarely provides the richness required to write personas.
A good article on the difference between market segmentation and persona development is Reconciling market segments and
personas by Elaine Brechin from Cooper Interaction Design:www.cooper.com/newsletters/2002_02/reconciling_market_segments_and_personas.htm
Personas have no place in the serious world of IT
Personas make some people feel uncomfortable. Talking about hypothetical users with real names and personalities can be too much for some, and the storytelling nature of personas just does not fit with some organisational or team cultures.
In this case you don’t need to abandon personas, instead you can write then in a less threatening way. Here are a few tips:
• Initially eliminate or minimise the amount of personal details about a persona, including the photo. You can introduce these later on if people start to warm to the concept.
• Give the persona a title rather than a name. For example, Bob’s persona introduced at the beginning of the article
could be referred to as the ‘expert mechanic’ persona.
• Write the persona as a list of bullet points rather than a narrative. Keep the bullet points to short statements about the
user’s goals, behaviours, likes and dislikes.
An example of how Bob’s persona can be modified is shown at the bottom of this page. Although this does not have the richness of the narrative persona, it still does the job of focusing the team on the needs of the user.
How can a small set of personas represent the user population
When explaining for the first time that an intranet or website can be designed around only a handful of personas, some people will look at you with disbelief. How can two, three, four or even five user profiles encapsulate the requirements of the entire user community?
Traditionally user-centred design involved researching the needs of as many users as possible and collecting all of their requirements. This resulted in a long list of needs with no sense of priority. This lack of direction typically translated into designs that tried to serve all users but ended up serving no user particularly well.
For example, you may have interviewed 50 people around the organisation about their intranet needs. You have compiled a list of requested content and some ideas about the functionality users’ desire, such as a phone book linked to the organisation chart and the ability to check how much annual leave they have left. You also know that the call centre
users need access to a range of information very quickly if their call response times are not to be adversely affected. Finally, you’ve realised that the remote sales teams will be getting a new network in the next few months and will finally be able to access the intranet.
What do you do with all these needs? Do you design the intranet so it meets the needs of the call centre staff? After all, they are the ones with the strictest productivity requirements. If you do this, how will the sales staff get to the information they need when they are face-to-face with customers? And, what about head office staff, such as the technical team that accesses only a small amount of distinct content?
Personas cut through this confusion. They allow you to identify discrete sets of users and create typical users to represent each group. Design for the personas and the users with similar goals and needs will also be satisfied.
Design for a discrete set of personas and satisfy all users with similar goals
By defining primary and secondary personas you can also work out who to design for first and whether you need to design more than one user interface. The needs of a primary persona will not be met if you design for someone else, whereas others are likely to be satisfied with the primary persona’s interface. For example, if you design for the call centre staff, the remote sales staff and the head office technical team might also be satisfied. However if you design just for the head office technical team, the call centre and sales staff are unlikely to be happy.
The call centre staff persona is a primary persona, whereas the head office technical team is a secondary persona. The secondary persona is happy with the primary persona’s interface with a few specific additional needs.
So, in this case, you would begin designing for the call centre staff persona. This is a lot easier than facing a 10 or 20 page list of user requirements.
Interview real users and business people that interact with users
How to create personas
Decide on a research method The purpose of the research is to identify trends or patterns in user behaviours, expectations and motivations to form the basis of the personas. One of the best ways to gather this data is to interview real users. This is usually achievable when designing intranets but becomes harder when you need access to users of a public website.
If you have access to users, decide who to interview by listing the groups of people that might use the intranet or website. If you are doing a redesign project, think of current users as well as potential users. Trends are usually seen after talking to around 10 or so users, however you may need to speak to more if there are a lot users with vastly different needs. Once you hear the same thing over and over again, it‘s time to stop.
If you really can‘t get access to users then attempt a combination of the following research methods. Try not to rely on a single method, rather use at least two avenues of research. Also, if you interview users, consider supplementing the interviews with one of the research methods below. This will produce richer data and can verify your interview findings.
• Interview business stakeholders that interact frequently with users. These people have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with end users and are already conscious of users’behavioural patterns. Respect the wealth of knowledge your business stakeholders hold and get them involved early on in the persona research. This helps to build their buy in to the persona technique.
• Review market research and interview your organisation’s market research specialists. Once again these people have
frequent interaction with end users and are trained to pick up patterns in attitudes and behaviours. They may not have created personas before, but if you ask the right questions you’ll gather useful information to add to your research data.
• Survey users and business stakeholders using quantitative methods. This is a good way to gather large amounts of
demographic data and to identify trends in skill levels and tasks performed. However it cannot replace direct interaction and observation with interview subjects as there is no way to tap into the users’ subconscious beliefs and attitudes.
• If you are designing a web site, talk to friends and family that are users of the current website or potential users of the
new website. Chat to people over dinner parties or at the pub. This is not rigorous research, but some research is better than
none.
Conduct the research
Now that you have decided on your research methods, carry out the research. If conducting interviews, plan to spend about one hour per interview. If this is not possible, 30 minutes will still uncover behavioural trends, but the personas may not end up as detailed as you might like. Interviews with users are best conducted in the environment in which they will use the
intranet or website. This provides the opportunity to observe what users do as opposed to what they say they do.