Personas: Focusing on getting the design right – Part 2
By: Fiona Meighan
Published - 15 August 2007
Target audience: Product Managers and User Experience practitioners who have not yet created their own personas before.
In Part I of this article, we discussed what Personas are and how they can inform design to ensure products and services focus on customer needs and goals. We also discussed the importance of using primary data about real users to create personas. A hypothetical case study was given for a company called SecureCam who needed to redesign their service, with the view to using personas to assist with this task. In Part 2, the individual components of a persona are described and an example persona relating to the SecureCam case study is provided.
What personas should include
The key objectives of creating personas is to ensure you develop a great product that meets target user's needs, allows them to achieve their goals and engages them. The bulk of data included in a persona, therefore needs to provide clues on what and how to develop for the users represented by the persona.
The following list describes components that are often included in a typical persona that provide these "clues":
- Experience goals. What the user would like to experience when using the service, for example, not feeling stupid, a sense of satisfaction, enjoyment, an efficient way of working.
- Life goals (optional). For example, "seeking to be promoted to senior management". Life goals should only be included where they're relevant to the product or service being developed. Being promoted may not be relevant in the design of a computer game, but may be highly relevant in the development of educational tools or employment search engines.
- Business goal. If the product you're developing is supporting a business, the goals of that business are listed here, for example, to deliver products within 24 hours of an order being placed.
- Likes & Dislikes . What customers like and dislike about the tools and approaches they currently use to achieve their goals.
- Daily tasks. Those tasks that support achieving goals should be included.
- Less frequent tasks. Less frequent tasks are often equally important to more frequent tasks.
- Technical skills. The persona's technical skills, particularly those in relation to computer competency if this is relevant to the product or service being designed should be described.
- Tools. Describe tools the persona uses including when and where these are used, for example, carrying a mobile phone or PDA when on a business trip.
- An assessment of how well the current way of carrying out the tasks is working is also important.
Fictitious elements that help to breathe life into the persona, such as their name, a photo, the university they went to, details about their office cubicle may also be included. It is important that specific rather than vague details are used in order to create personas that feel like real people (do not say "Fred works in finance" but rather "Fred works as a bank teller at ABC bank in their city office).
Each persona should be no more than 1 to 2 easy to read pages. If more information than this is included it is likely to make it difficult to focus on what's truly important to the persona.
Format of persona
The persona can take the form of a narrative, where relevant data is woven into a story about the persona. This has the advantage of creating a story about the user and for designers to see the persona as a real person. They see "Adam" or "Sue" just as they would a character in a movie.
Another way of laying out a persona is to use sub-headings of the areas listed above with descriptions under each. The benefit of this layout is that designers can easily find specific data points when they're designing rather than having to sift through a narrative to find the point the team might be debating on (e.g. when "Adam" travels, does he take a PDA with him?).
Why less is more
When you're creating a persona, it's important to keep in the back of your mind at all times that most elements you include should provide information that helps inform design. While personas should include details that help bring the archetype to life, too much extraneous or irrelevant information can make it difficult for designers to pull out the important, relevant information. Types of distracting information include:
- Irrelevant or too much of a "back story" about the persona. The designers don't need to know that Aunt Mary visits once a week unless they're developing, for example, an entertainment system that Aunt Mary might use or watch.
- The inclusion of all data points gathered about the persona without due consideration about how relevant each data point is to achieving the task at hand. If a data point is irrelevant, leave it out.
- Too much detail. For example, understanding task flows is important, but usually unnecessary to include detailed step by step task information as part of the persona. In fact, part of the design process is likely to be to re-engineer task flows to meet goals more efficiently and effectively than they've been met in the past. Too much task information may pre-empt design and inhibit this re-engineering.
Limiting the number of goals and tasks to those the user really wants to carry out helps identify and eliminate features that are "possible", but that no-one or very few people use. This in turn helps reduce design and development effort (saves money) and de-clutters the user interface (making it easier to use). Try to include no more than 4 of each type of goal.
Once you've created your final personas, before distributing them to the team, ruthlessly edit them. Remove any information that may be distracting or cause indecision in the design process. This will help ensure you keep your team focussed.
Example Persona for SecureCam
In our SecureCam example (described in part 1 of this article), imagine that you've assigned someone to carry out some interviews with a number of existing customers as well as some potential new customers who use competitor security camera products. These interviews involved observing the interviewees using the security camera service they currently subscribe to and asking a number of questions about how and when they use the service. Your team also interviewed two SecureCam customer support representatives and a sales executive to find out what these staff members know about SecureCam's customer's needs, wants and goals as well as what works well and what doesn't. Finally, you obtained some marketing reports that provide detailed information about the demographics and psychographics of SecureCam users.
You now have plenty of primary and secondary data from which you identify three personas you'd like to cater for. One of the personas you create is named Adam. The first draft of Adam's persona could look something like the one below.
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Name: |
Adam Sandridge |
Age: |
35 |
Occupation: |
Owner of Gems Inc, a Jewellery company specialising in wedding rings. Adam owns three 3 stores, one in Melbourne, one in Sydney and one in Hong Kong. |
Marital status and family: |
Adam is married to Sue and has a five year old daughter Imogen as well as a new baby on the way. |
Wife's occupation: |
Advertising Executive for Vibrant Image, a company in Melbourne |
Location: |
Lives in Melbourne |
Leisure and hobbies: |
Watches two hours of TV every night on average. Likes to spend quality time with his family and laments not being able to keep in touch with them when he's travelling. (Side note: this observation may lead the design team to include a video conferencing feature as part of SecureCam to help keep in touch with family). Plays golf on the weekends when there's time. Loves socialising. |
Background information: |
As the owner of three outlets, Adam spends a significant amount of his time travelling. Adam started from scratch and set up his business on his own following in the footsteps of his jeweller parents. He's not afraid of taking risks, but demands quality in any products or systems he uses. As his clients are usually very busy, many in the midst of preparing for their wedding, Adam can't afford for there to be any disruptions to the smooth operations of Gems Inc. Adam has appointed one manager per store and they each manage two other people. In total, Adam employs nine staff. |
Business Goals: |
Increase sales in the Asia Pacific region by 24% in the next year. Establish 4 more offices across Australia, Singapore and Mainland China in the next 5 years. Reduce travel costs by 20% in the next year. |
Goals using SecureCam: |
Feel secure in knowing all is well at each of the stores, and if there's a security problem be quickly alerted along with local authorities. Be able to check new merchandising displays and all staff are wearing their uniforms. Prevent theft, and inefficiencies through monitoring in-store activities. |
Daily tasks |
Check that each store has opened on time using SecureCam. Check in with each store manager at open and close of business to address any problems and check on takings. Read emails and identify if there are any wholesalers offering any special offers. Check inventory at each store and make purchases as appropriate. Work for 1-2 hours in Melbourne store. In the evening check via SecureCam that all stock has been put away properly. Day to day management and administrative tasks. |
Less Frequent tasks: |
Monthly: Reviews data collected from SecureCam with regard to the number of people entering each store and calculates sales conversion rate and average sale value to help identify which areas of the sales process are working well and which need improvement. Sales reports collated for all areas. Plans and implements new in-store promotions. Checks that everything has been implemented as it should be. Formulates strategy and direction with store managers. Stocktakes, reconciles stock with inventory list. Business development – identifying new store sites and establishing relationships with locals in target development countries and regions. |
Key skills: |
Moderately computer literate, but always calls tech support if there's a problem with computer software. Relies on his friend Dave, to show him how to do new things such as uploading video onto the internet. Has specialist knowledge as a jeweller handed down from his parents. |
Education: |
High School and Business Administration degree. |
Likes when using SecureCam: |
When in front of a PC he can simultaneously view his three offices to make sure all is ok, and view new displays have been set out correctly. People-counter feature that tells him the number of people that have entered each store each day. Motion sensor and alarm that alerts Adam if there are any disturbances at his stores out of business hours. |
Dislikes when using SecureCam: |
Unable to view offices when travelling. Tried to see if he could view the service on his PDA, but that was a nightmare as SecureCam froze on his device. Unable to store more than the last 24 hours of data. Sometimes "loses" people counter data, he's not sure how or why. |
Concerns and needs: |
Wants to make sure staff are at the store during business hours as stores are sometimes staffed by only one person. Keep track of who's been in and out of the store. Have footage available if there's a burglary Be able to easily call police if there's a problem Would like to be sent an alert if movement is detected when the stores are closed |
A final word on personas Once you've developed personas for a particular product or service, it may be tempting to re-use them for the development of other products or services – this is not recommended unless they are very closely related to the initial service you designed! As each persona is created based on context-specific information, they do not usually translate easily from one product to another. You are likely to need to know different types of information for each product or service. For example, the details about Adam as described above would not be suitable for developing printer software that SecureCam is thinking of diversifying into. For this, we would need to know about Adam's usage patterns and needs in relation to printers not covered above. This type of information would need to be gathered again using real customer data. If you were targeting the printing software at the same customers as your SecureCam you could keep the basic demographic details about Adam, but you'd need to create the rest from new data. We hope you enjoy using personas to achieve design excellence!
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Next article: Cognitive Walkthrough and Heuristic Evaluation in the Contemporary Design Process
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