Yahoo’s Approach to Keeping Personas Alive
May 18th, 2006
One of the big struggles teams have is creating a long-term adoption of their target personas. While personas are often accepted initially, it’s hard for the team to keep them “alive” for the entire project duration. Our research has shown those teams which manage to keep them alive are more likely to produce more usable designs, so we’re always interested in new techniques.
That’s why I perked up at the recent CHI Conference in Montreal when Yahoo!’s Aviva Rosenstein, Manager of Design Research for the Yahoo Media Group, shared her thoughts on getting development teams to adopt personas into their process.
Aviva talked about a recent project, where she had a laminated 3-fold card made up to describe the key attributes of the six personas the team was using.
Aviva described a “party” she threw, where she invited all of the team members to introduce them to the personas. Instead of a regular presentation, she gave each team member the 3-fold card and placed a sticker on their back containing the name of one of the persona identities. The team then played a game of having to guess their new identity by asking yes-or-no questions to other team members. The idea was to find someone else in the room with the same identity as they had.
Aviva said it was a real treat to watch all the team members as they studied their laminated cheat-sheets and asked each other pertinent questions.
The result? Aviva said she was pleased to find the team continuing to use the personas. It was not uncommon to see them bring their laminated cards to meetings and refer to them throughout the process.
A scene from a Yahoo! team meeting. Note the persona on the whiteboard and the 3-fold cards on the table.
What have you done to keep personas alive with your development teams?
May 19th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Great article. Couldn’t help but notice though that all the personas seem very … cool. Sort of twentysomething designer type-ish
But I guess if that’s their audience…
June 3rd, 2006 at 2:57 am
Zephyr: note that there were six personas in the full set and the image only shows three of them
glad you enjoyed it, Jared!
June 20th, 2006 at 3:33 am
[...] Je suis retombé un peu par hasard sur le concept d’utilisateur-type (ou personas en anglais) via une liste de diffusion. Une petite recherche ciblée sur le web, m’a permis de tomber sur des articles francophones et anglophones qui expliquent le sujet, quelques liens ci-après, après une brève introduction. De manière générale, lorsqu’on développe un site internet, par exemple, il est judicieux de réflechir aux profils des utilisateurs-type qui seront censés utiliser l’application. Pourquoi dresser ces profils? La raison est toute simple et très pratique lorsque les budgets sont serrés ou qu’on n’a pas le temps d’effectuer des tests utilisateurs; en effet, cette pratique permet aux designers, aux ergonomes et aux développeurs de guider les différents choix graphiques ou fonctionnels et éviter des développements inutiles. Pour en savoir plus je vous invite à piocher dans les archives de Fred Cavazza qui a fait le tour depuis un petit moment. Il nous incite, entre autre, à voir un exemple concret chez les gaillards de Yahoo! ou encore de lire lire l’article Pourquoi est-ce que la technique des profils (Personas) est efficace lors de la construction d’un site Web?. Pour terminer un article édité par boxesandarrows qui nous donne quelques conseils sur la manière d’optimiser cette pratique. A noter enfin, que les personas peuvent être utilisées pour le développement d’applications non-web… je viens de me rappeler que dans le cadre du développement de périphériques, mes anciens collègues marketeurs utilisaient cette technique, surtout durant les longues sessions de brainstorming. [...]
August 15th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[...] (Over at Yahoo!, they use something similar for the personas they create.) [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
good work!
March 18th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Another great tip Jared, thanks again!