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A Practical Guide to Creating & Using Personas for the Web
Question or comment? authors@practicalpersonas.com
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.
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.).
personacreation.com: a new blog to keep an eye on.
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!
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."
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.
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.
