Personas and User Scenarios HIMS 650

What are Personas?

§  A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.

§  Research-driven (qualitative) §  New, extremely well-regarded & popular technique

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Persona Definition Process

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2. Affinity Mapping chunks behaviors and attributes into

different personas 3. Persona Creation 1. Ethnographic

Research

Demographics Psychographics Job Role

Goals Workflow

Vera Celine

Behaviors/Habits

The Role of Ethnography

§  Ethnography is “a branch of anthropology that studies and describes modern human cultures”

§  A vital design research technique because people aren’t good at telling you what they really do or need, and even worse at telling you what to build

§  A skilled ethnographer must observe people at work, probing with questions about their activities in a master-apprentice style interview (this is frequently called “Contextual Inquiry.”)

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Why use personas?

§  Personas allow design and development teams to have access to users

§  Personas provide another channel for innovation and insight

§  Personas help end feature debates §  Personas focus on user goals, which are critical to

designing effective tools for the user base that the persona represents

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Personas for insight and innovation

§  More understanding of user work practices and goals will lead to insight into what will be desirable for them

§  Gain better understanding of what will be useful

§  After this understanding, we can tune solution to optimize usability

§  Users cannot articulate what will eventually be useful for them … a laundry list of complaints is not good enough

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Should my solution solve issues for folks in this part of the hospital?

Or this part?

Or just this part?

What usually changes?

§  Roles clarification §  Clients target where initiatives should be launched (what we’re

doing) §  Designers determine how the solution will accommodate the

requirements §  Engineering (technology) uses knowledge of technology and the

design documentation to build the solution §  Decision making

§  Feature decisions are made by asking which persona would use it §  Not by a vote, or gut feel, or personal preference, or “the

technology can’t do that” §  Validation of decisions performed by user research

§  Replaces “gut feel” or personal preference as the primary test of success or quality

§  Formal usability testing §  Ethnography (could be part of beta program)

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Now

Programmer: “What if the user wants to print this out?”

Manager: “I don’t think we really need to add printing in version one.”

Programmer: “But someone might want to print it out.”

Manager: “Well, yes, but can’t we delay putting printing in?”

Example of the change: feature debate

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Beginning with personas Programmer: “What if the user wants to print this out?” Interaction Designer: “Rosemary isn’t interested in printing things out.” Programmer: “But someone might want to print it.” Interaction Designer: “But we are designing for Rosemary, not for ‘someone’”

Personas firmly entrenched Programmer: “Would Rosemary want to print this out?” Interaction Designer: “No, although Jacob will want some printed reports on a quarterly basis.” Programmer: “Well, if they are so rarely needed, we should save ourselves some time and effort by not writing a fancy, proprietary report-writing feature, but instead license a commercially available tool.” Manager: “And that shaves two weeks off of the shipping schedule!” Issue: feature debate is over,

but still takes a long time to get into agreement (point of view is that of user, but still cloudy to the project team)

Issues: feature debate is only delayed, significant project churn to get everyone back in agreement (everyone has a different point of view)

User Scenarios

§  Now that you have your personas, what will you do with them?

§  Tell future stories about how your personas will use this new system

§  Talk about real situations with plausible details §  Scenarios should answer the questions

§  “Why would she want to use this system?” §  “Why is this feature important?”

Further reading

§  How-to guide: About Face 2.0, Cooper §  The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Cooper §  http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters_personas.asp

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§  Split into 4 groups

§  Use yellow post-its to record information from your interviews

§  Use other colored post-it’s to record themes

§  These are the seeds for your individual personas and scenarios

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