Meet Glen, my imaginary duck-best friend when I was 5. Who said only dogs can be a man’s best friend? Glen liked to play the guitar; he liked to drink milk straight out of the carton, he watched Tom and Jerry between 17:00 and 19:00 after he completed his homework and ruffled his feathers.
Let’s swiftly leap to 17 years later. Put Glen through some rapid and unreasonable evolution; sans feathers and webbed feet, equipped with an X10 he has metamorphosed into John Chang 22, financial analyst pre-dusk, user of our in-construction web application post work hours. He is not just another figment of my imagination but also one of our 5 protagonists, our persona.
How do we create personas?
Allowing yourself to play Creator and letting your imagination bring out the best suitable homo sapiens (well, in most cases) is a good start.
Do your homework, get your radar out
Observe the behaviour of users who will actually use your application. Interview them; stay on the look out for reliable second hand information to know who they are and what they really want. Carrying out future work based on assumptions is fine but what if your assumptions were wrong all along? Your friendly helper could turn into a menacing destroyer.
Brainstorm
With data at your disposal go about the task of identifying similar behaviour patterns and grouping the users into segments. This is invariably done based on their traits, attitudes and needs. Create unique personas in each segment. Having personas with overlapping personalities will make it hazier to focus on whom the design is intended for. As Alan Cooper, the father of personas writes: “It is the specificity and detail of personas that gives them their value.”
Sketch the personas but take care not to overpopulate
A persona is someone who has certain needs and these needs drove you to create a solution for. Avoid stereotyping or creating X-men clones. He should be someone you can empathize with. Give him a body, configure him, give him an attitude, and develop on his background and nomenclature.
Identify a small number of strategically significant personas. Introduce them to your team and have the team remember the personas by their name. Having too many personas will confound them.
You’d want your persona to focus on behaviour, motivations and goals and not necessarily on demographics so know when to cut out the steer past the irrelevant. It’s easy to get carried away and attribute the persona with a multitude of characteristics but remind yourself that personas are a design tool; they should help your designers make better decisions.
And finally, remember that cats might have nine lives but personas can not. John Chang cannot be recycled to the next project.
