In our research on personas, we’ve found this works best when the personas are based on real people doing real things. We regularly take teams into the field to meet their users and watch them interact in their own environments. We then capture the interesting bits to assemble our personas. We know we’ve done a great job when we can point to any element of the persona description and talk about the different real users we observed, doing and saying the same things.

What happens when we can’t do the research with the real users? Tamara Adlin does something she calls Ad-Hoc Personas, where the team gathers all the information they already know without doing any new research. Kim Goodwin does something similar that she calls Provisional Personas.

Because we often already know a lot about the people we’ve been selling our product to and supporting, we can build a decent picture of what they are like and what they need. If we combine different viewpoints, like those from sales, training, and support, it’s possible to surface a lot of interesting details to design with.

However, these aren’t as rich as the fully-researched personas we started with. It’s hard to separate out the mythology that forms around users from the reality. The advantage of going into the field is we can see where that mythology breaks down.

It’s possible we could go even farther away from the research by creating personas that are complete fiction. The team could ask, “What do imagine users might be like?” and “What do we think those users might do?” I guess it’s possible personas crafted from complete fiction like this can inspire the team to innovation, but it’s likely not better than self design, which would at a minimum have checks and balances of contact with someone using it.

The “persona purists” argue that completely fictional personas aren’t real personas at all. Their argument is that when we dilute the research component that goes behind the persona, we take risks that a design built from those personas won’t fit the needs of real users as well.

At UIE, we’ve seen multiple teams go down this fictional road, then end up with descriptions that nobody believed in. The team didn’t rally around it and the personas turned out to be a wasted effort. Because they were labeled “personas”, it was impossible to get those teams to buy into a subsequent well-researched persona project. They were completely turned off by the idea of personas and were against any future investment in them.

Should we come up with a different name for those things we create from pure fiction, like “user caricatures” or “fictional users”? (When I asked Kim Goodwin if she had a name for completely fictional personas, she called them “creative writing class exercise.” That sums it up pretty well, I think.) Should we go to efforts to explain that things without research aren’t personas?

What about the Ad-hoc Personas or Provisional Personas? Should we stop calling them personas too?

We don’t want personas to become diluted so much that the term doesn’t have meaning. How do we protect the value of these tools without getting lost in semantic mumbo-jumbo?

Now, if we’re building enterprise accounting software, why do we need to know whether Mary has a schnauzer or Wilbur drives a Hummer? There’s nothing those details will help us in the design.

Every detail in a persona description should help inform decisions in the design. Because of that detail, we should have no trouble saying what we’d do. When we’re working on accounting software, knowing they are a PC or a Mac user could be important. Knowing that our persona visits their customers and need up-to-the-minute inventory data on the road is likely to be critical. But what does it matter what car they drive?

I call this problem the “Dog and Hummer Trap.” It’s when the design teams takes their persona descriptions just a little too far.

However, this client team was different. They were designing a searchable database of home improvement projects.

Pets and cars, in fact, are important. The team wanted to have a way to identify “pet friendly” projects, where they provided special instructions for keeping safe from the hazards of construction.

They also wanted to help users figure out how they’ll get the materials home. A SUV carries more than an Mini Cooper, so the make of car matters.

The Dog and Hummer Trap isn’t specifically about dogs and cars. It’s about making sure you’re focusing on those details that’ll make a difference in the design.

We’re celebrating this year’s User Interface 16 Conference’s fantastic program by giving everyone access to last year’s great show. The recordings and slide decks contain these great topics:

• Engaging team members in the design process
• Developing a content strategy
• Designing for mobile
• Evangelizing design within the corporate culture
• Understanding styles of decision making
• Incorporating testing and prototyping
• Making successful personas
• Evolving design ideas
• Creating a UX library

You’ll hear from these top UX experts: Luke Wroblewski, Kristina Halvorson, Nathan Curtis, Dan Rubin, Leah Buley, Dave Gray, Kim Goodwin, Tamara Adlin, and Jared Spool.

How to get the free recordings?

It’s easy. Just sign up by October 13, 11:59 PM ET and you’ll get last year’s UI15 talks and materials for free. No tricks, no gimmicks. We’ll send you an email with details on how to access this bundle of goodness.

Now hurry and get last year’s UI15 recordings before October 13, 11:59 pm ET.

I don’t decide to leave out the baking soda (even though I don’t really know what the baking soda does). Nor do I decide to cut the sugar in half (even though I think lots of sugar is probably bad for me). Why? Because if I did those things, the cake wouldn’t come out well.

This is exactly what we see teams do with their persona and scenario projects.

We see a lot of teams trying to create them. Building out solid personas is a great way to create innovative user experiences, when done well. Yet, many teams choose to sabotage their persona projects, producing something that doesn’t do the job and wastes valuable resources.

There are many recipes for great personas, yet the teams decide to take shortcut, skip steps, or just plain do something that doesn’t make sense. They don’t follow the recipe. Then they complain when the project doesn’t turn out well. And they lose the value that comes from a well-executed persona project.

In this today’s UIEtips, we explore five ways that teams we’ve studied sucked the value away from their persona projects. They seem like obvious things to do right, yet these teams opted to go another way, and then didn’t see the value they were hoping for.

Read the article, 5 Ways To Suck Value Away From Your Persona Projects.

At the User Interface 16 Conference, we’ll be exploring ways to get the most from your design projects, including persona techniques. Kim Goodwin will show us how to get huge value from creating great scenarios to drive our designs. And Steve Portigal will show us how to use field research to uncover insights and produce solid innovations. Check out UI16.

Earlier this year, Kim presented a UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Scenarios: Putting Your Personas to Work. There were so many awesome questions, but we ran out of time for Kim to answer them. So Kim and Adam recorded a podcast addressing the unanswered questions.

Today’s UIEtips article is based on Adam and Kim’s podcast focusing on 2 questions: Do you need data to effectively do scenarios, and what’s the difference between scenarios and storyboarding?

Read the article Designing with Scenarios: Putting Your Personas to Work.

Kim Goodwin is our go to person when it comes to personas and scenarios. If you missed her virtual seminar, in May, you can still access it. And we’re very excited to have Kim back at the User Interface 16 Conferenceto give a full-day workshop on scenarios. Her workshop was one of the highest rated at last year’s conference. Explore Kim’s workshop and the other seven workshops offered UI16.

For the past few years, we’ve been researching why so many persona projects have such dismal results. We discovered there are basic factors that are critical for a project’s success, yet most teams ignored them.

In today’s UIEtips, I discuss five of these factors. We look at the role of research, who should be involved in the personas, and other essentials that differentiates between a successful persona project and a failed one. I’m sure you’ll find it helpful for planning your projects.

Read the article: Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects

While I’m on the subject of UX techniques, I’m really looking forward to Cennydd Bowles’ upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited. Cennydd is a kick-ass presenter and his book, Undercover User Experience Design, is a brand new classic. Find out more about the seminar.

Have you tried to use personas in your projects? What have you found to be the keys to your project’s success (or the reason for your project’s demise)? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Kim Goodwin is an expert when it comes to developing scenarios. In her virtual seminar, Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work, she uses her immense experience to outline the relationship between personas and scenarios and how to bring them into your design process. Kim graciously returns to answer the questions she did not have time to address during the seminar for this podcast.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“I think that you certainly can do this without data. It’s always a great idea to have data if you can, ’cause it has a few benefits, right? One is, you’re more confident that you’re getting to a good answer. And it makes it a lot easier to make design decisions because instead of wondering, “hmm. How would people like this react?” You kind of know.

Think of it like, you know, planning an event, or buying a gift for one of your loved ones, versus, say, buying a gift for your brand-new in-laws, whom you don’t know very well.

The first one is a whole lot easier than the second one, and data really helps you have that confidence that you’re doing the right thing. And the second point is that data helps you persuade stakeholders, because then it’s not you, the designer — who is probably pretty low on the totem pole, so to speak — saying this is how it should be. It’s you, the designer, channeling the users and saying, “Look, based on our data, here’s how people think and act, and so here’s why this is a great solution.”

Now, that said, I definitely do scenarios without data. I was doing a project just a couple of weeks ago, actually, working with some subject matter experts on an idea for a medical thing, just a little startup company. And so, four of us sat in a room, and we didn’t have data. And the point was to get to some design ideas fairly quickly, so that they could explore feasibility of this idea.

And so, it didn’t make a lot of sense for us to go get data, and we said, “OK, let’s build some shared assumptions about the kinds of users we’re talking about.” We came up with what I call provisional personas, which are sort of just sketchy representations of what we think the usage patterns and goals are. And then we use those to create scenarios just as we normally would.

So, scenarios are a tool you can pull out of your pocket regardless of whether you have data. They’re equally effective as generation tools. You’re just going to be making decisions and communicating with a bit less confidence when you don’t have data. But the tool still works great…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Kim address these additional questions:

• What’s a good approach to get buy-in from non-UX stakeholders, and prove the value of building the personas and then creating the scenarios?
• To what extent should scenarios come from your clients or stakeholders?
• How do you use personas to help inform a solution that will work for a broader range of personas?
• What’s the best way to communicate your scenarios with the development team and get their buy-in for what you’ve created?
• What is the difference between a scenario and a storyboard?
• Do scenarios live beyond the project they’re developed for?

Do you have experience using scenarios? Please share any thoughts or comments in our comments section.

Want to learn more? Get lifetime access to Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work for just $109 when you use the promotion code SPOOLCAST.

Recorded: June, 2011
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Now the team learned from usability studies that the site wasn’t resonating with the users. They couldn’t understand why. The team incorporated all the ideas and information that the marketing team gave them. Turns out, that was the main problem.

Instead of actually conducting ethnographic interviews with users and building a design around a set of personas, the team developed a design around non-existent research and what the marketing department and executives desired. Ah, if only they created some personas first.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article that Kim Goodwin wrote in 2005. It’s a classic. Everything about it still holds true to this day. Kim discusses how personas affect design and the type of goals to think about when creating personas. If you’re new to personas, this is a must read. And if you’ve been doing personas for a while, it’s a great refresher.

Read the article: Perfecting Your Personas.

Personas are just part of building better designs. The next step is to incorporate personas into scenarios. Luckily, Kim Goodwin is giving our next virtual seminar on just that – Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work. Learn more about today’s virtual seminar. (We record the seminar so if you can’t make it today, you can listen to it another
time).

Does your team create personas? How have they helped your design? Let us know your thoughts and questions below.

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Effective communication is the basis for keeping your team organized. But how can you be certain that everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to business goals, objectives, and the user experience perspective? Using personas can set you in that direction and Tamara Adlin specializes in just that.

Tamara is the founder of adlin, inc., a customer experience consulting firm. She is an expert in developing personas and has written two books on the subject, The Persona Lifecycle and The Essential Persona Lifecycle. In her Virtual Seminar, The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization on the Same Page, she ran short of time to answer all the questions. Today we bring you the follow up podcast with Jared Spool and Tamara answering those remaining questions.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…I just don’t think that it works to have personas thrown over the fence. You can certainly go hire somebody to do a bunch of market research and a bunch of behavioral research and come back with shiny documents and big posters and whatever.

But I just don’t think that works. You have people still thinking the words “enterprise” and “small business,” and if you don’t get that stuff out it will never disappear. And the only way to get that stuff out is to have people convince themselves that it’s not so great, it’s not as useful as they thought.

However, if you’re using them to try to mirror back to execs what you think you hear them saying – the trick that I use is, “Well, let’s imagine this person,” like you said, Ahmed, “(he) is a program manager and has to manage this incredibly remote team all over the world and somehow has to have our product to do that. Isn’t it true that if we don’t satisfy him, we failed? I mean, isn’t he right smack-dab in the middle of the people that we’re trying to help?”

And people will say, “Yeah.” So, it’s not a matter of saying, “He’s the most important.” It’s more like saying, “If we don’t satisfy this dude, what are we doing?” Isn’t that true?…”

The real value of using personas comes from the ability to mirror back what you think is being communicated and arrive at that common understanding. This can be difficult. You need to show the issues that need addressing in the first place. As Tamara states in the podcast: “You all can’t be on the same page if there isn’t a page”.

Tune in to the podcast and hear Tamara address these questions as well.

• Don’t the stakeholders in the meeting need to know the consumers before they can make assumptions about building personas?
• How do you get the stakeholders in the room? How do you get the boss and the grand-boss and the great-grand-boss to participate?
• Does this technique make sense in a remote environment? Can you actually create personas remotely?
• Does the ad hoc persona technique lend itself well for creating a customer experience in services oriented organization?
• Can personas align with marketing segments, or is it something completely different?
• How do you sell ad hoc personas into a project where they’ve been down that road and it was a complete failure?

Please feel free to share with us any of your own experiences with personas and any other thoughts or questions in our comments section.

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SEO and User Experience shouldn’t be at odds with one another. That’s what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week’s SpoolCast with Jared Spool. Vanessa is the founder of Nine By Blue, author of Marketing in the Age of Google, and a former Googler herself. Tamara is the founder of adlin, inc, author of multiple books on personas, and a former customer experience leader at Amazon. Vanessa and Tamara are giving a full-day workshop on using business-driven personas to create holistic search and experience strategies at the User Interface 15 Conference. In this podcast, you’ll get a taste of what they’ve been working on.

When you make something usable, it naturally attracts search engines. That may fly in the face of some of the SEO talk you’ve heard. Vanessa tells us not to build your site with search algorithms in mind. Algorithms change. Instead you should build your site towards the aim of the search.

Tamara suggests building our sites around conversations with our users. That’s what the search engines reward. What problem does your product or service solve? Answer your customers’ questions on your site, and you’ll be found.

You need a holistic process across the silos.

A big stumbling block to this common sense approach to UX is corporate politics. People are naturally most concerned about their silo of the company. Tamara and Vanessa believe a good UX consultant will see the silo and ask everyone to step back and ask “What are the business goals”? It seems silly, but it’s effective. No UX or SEO will succeed without that clarity, says Tamara.

We’re thrilled to have Vanessa and Tamara give a full-day workshop on embracing SEO and UX through personas. We hope you’ll join us there. You can learn more about this topic and workshop in the podcast. Don’t forget to leave us your questions and comments here, below.

Explore Tamara and Vanessa’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by November 5 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

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Kim Goodwin

Scenarios are comprehensive stories that describe how a persona interacts with your product or service. They are a powerful design tool that allows you to make intelligent design decisions based on your user research.

If there is a grand dutchess of personas, scenarios, and design processes, it’s Kim Goodwin. That’s why we asked Kim to do a workshop on turning user research into action at UI15. In this podcast, Jared Spool spoke with her about that workshop and some common myths surrounding scenarios.

Jared suggests that scenarios have grown out of necessity. Requirement documentation simply doesn’t cut it when starting the design process. Beyond what’s “needed”, you need user research. Kim says that requirements are flawed without user input.

“Let’s all start from a shared understanding of our users.”

Two common misunderstandings about scenarios involve their relationship to Agile processes. It’s easy to believe that Agile and scenarios are not compatible. If you have your designers and developers sitting down together on day one, you can’t have part of the work done ahead, right? Kim asks, why not? Placing research and scenarios in front of your designers and developers gives them a great starting point.

Some people confuse Agile’s user stories with scenarios. They are not the same, but they are compatible. Scenarios are all encompassing. One of their strengths is that they can span your company’s silos. A customer doesn’t see you as a series of departments, they see you as one brand. Within an Agile environment, your web team will not likely be designing both a web feature and a physical retail procedure simultaneously. Therefore, you can carve out the relevant bits of the scenario to create your user story for your current sprint.

“How hard is it for a three-year-old to make up a story? Storytelling is such a natural human tool… it’s really very easy.”

One complaint about scenarios is that they take too long to create. But Kim reports she uses them on even the smallest projects with tight schedules. Even if it’s just one afternoon with a few key stakeholders, she puts a lot of value in building shared assumptions about who the users are.

There is more ground covered in the interview. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript for more scenario mythbusting. Kim, who is a masterful teacher, also describes what she has in store for her full-day scenario workshop at User Interface 15, “Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work”

Explore Kim’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by October 19 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

This year’s topics are an eclectic collection that really says a lot about the current state of online web and software design. The program tells the story of the full development cycle, from coming up with innovative ideas, to making those ideas a reality, to growing the design to fill out its nooks and crannies.

Here’s the UI15 line-up and why we chose these amazing presenters

Leah Buley‘s Good Design Fast session was so popular last year because it really resonated with everyone. We all want to be innovative, to generate new ideas that will blow away our customers and our co-workers. Leah’s session looks at the design process. Whether creating a brand new product or service, or trying to rethink what your existing offerings could be, this workshop delivers the tools to make that happen quickly and effectively.

Dave Gray has opened our eyes on what visual thinking can do. By creating a simple visual vocabulary, filled with simple elements that even a self-proclaimed worst drawer can handle, Dave opens up a world of communication for all of us. We can take complex ideas and lay them out for others, in a simple and understandable way. Seeing our ideas visually gives us a view into the thinking behind them, and lets us see where everything fits together.

For years we’ve tried to get Tamara Adlin on our program. Finally, it’s happening. Tamara is the high priestess of building personas in the design process. Her experience and high energy will keep you captivated as she explains her techniques for effective persona development. The designs that come from teams with a strong understanding of their personas are worlds better than anything else we see.

Nobody knows more about interaction design than Kim Goodwin. She’s a regular high point at our conferences. Kim as the great ability to talk about all phases of the design process, from understanding the users and innovating new ideas, through creating screens and flows, to the final refinements and finishing touches. Every designer deserves a day in their career to hear Kim demonstrate her masterful design techniques.

Luke Wroblewski owns the title of The World’s Most Authoritative Expert on Web Form Design. Luke has spent the last few years studying every possible approach, testing each idea for effectiveness, and is now a walking encyclopedia on the topic. Whether you’re asking your users to create a new account, fill out an application, or file their taxes, when it comes to web-based forms, you need to hear Luke’s wisdom on what works and what doesn’t.

Dan Rubin has a magical way of taking the elements of good graphic design — typography, layout, color, and imagery — and demonstrating how they improve the usability, effectiveness, and feel of a design. After hearing Dan, we suddenly understood what separated great looking sites from those that were frustrating. If you need to know the secrets of how great visual designers get their great results, attend Dan’s workshop.

In the last year, Kristina Halvorson has actively put the most important element — the content — front and center. She’s at the forefront of the new discipline — Content Strategy. It combines copywriting, information architecture, web governance, and business strategy to help organizations get complete control over the most important ingredient of their sites. Attending this workshop will change the way you think about managing your site’s content.

Nathan Curtis‘ knowledge of building design patterns and component libraries is encyclopedic. After listening to Nathan, you’ll share our excitement about the benefits of having an effective pattern and component library. His techniques for discovering, documenting, and curating the library elements are powerfully easy to implement in any organization. Nathan’s workshop is essential for anyone looking to grow their design efforts to meet enterprise-wide scale.

Avoiding Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

There are a lot of choices to make here. We know, it’s a tough decision on which workshops to sign up for. We’ll make it a little easier for you. All you have to do now is register for UI15. You’ll choose the workshops later. When you register by September 9, we promise you’ll get the workshops of your choice. Plus, there’s an added bonus of saving your company $400.

Learn more about the program and register at www.uiconf.com.

Explore the conference program. Planning on attending? Register by 9/9/10 for the lowest rate of $1295.

When teams use personas well, every member of the team really does seem to be on the same page about who the users are and what design will work best for them. We haven’t seen any other technique come close to getting this kind of result.

Our research has surfaced obvious benefits from the technique, such as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth understanding of the user’s motivations. But, it’s also unveiled some benefits that we still don’t see discussed very much. Today’s UIEtips focuses on a past article we’re republishing, Three Important Benefits of Personas. In the article, I discuss some of these unrecognized benefits.

A section of this article discusses the age-old tradition of storytelling and how it ties in to learning and creating personas. Our next UIE Virtual Seminar, on Thursday, August 5, with Whitney Quesenbery is all about storytelling. Whitney will teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs. Learn more about this webinar, Storytelling for UX.

And if you want a deep dive into creating and using personas, you’ll definitely want to attend this year’s User Interface Conference on November 8-10 in Boston. Both Kim Goodwin and Tamara Adlin’s full-day workshop incorporate persona development and use to enhance your designs.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Has your design team created personas? What benefits have you seen? Join the discussion about this week’s topic below.

We discovered a variety of ways to create personas — each valuable in their own right. With our clients, we’ve been using a field-research-based technique. This method creates robust, data-based persona characters and scenarios.

Tamara Adlin has a fabulous workshop technique, one she calls Ad-Hoc Personas, which builds the characters out of information that the organization already knows.

Steve Mulder has some great techniques for using analytics and market research to gather and validate persona characteristics.

From our research, we’ve found all of these are useful methods and, when done well, deliver value.

When we analyzed the results, the initial findings show teams that approach personas the right way get great benefits from them. Unfortunately, many teams don’t realize what makes a persona project successful. They focus on the wrong aspects, dooming their project
to failure.

In this issue of UIEtips, I share the essence of successful persona projects — the key factors teams should understand. It turns out that once you know the right way to approach the project, it’s straightforward to make it successful.

Read the article, The Essence of a Successful Persona Project.

In the article, I talk about how impressed we are with Tamara Adlin’s Ad-Hoc Personas technique. We think this is an essential tool for getting everyone in the organization on the same page. Don’t miss the UIE Virtual Seminar on Thursday, February18, where Tamara walks us through the method. Read all about it.

Have you been successful at creating and using personas in your design work? Which factors do you think helped the most? Share your thoughts below.

On January 7 Peter Morville will discuss Search Design Patterns, and in the same session, Mark Burrell will tell you how to then use them.

Later in the month, on January 28, Steve Portigal will present to you his thoughts on studying your users in their own context, Ethnography.

During last year’s UIE Roadshow, our audiences couldn’t get enough on the topic of personas. So, on February 18, we’ve asked Tamara Adlin to talk about The Power of Ad-hoc Personas. Personas can be your ticket to lasting organizational clarity… and it doesn’t take a ton of costly research.

With his book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide just hitting the bookstore shelves, Todd Zaki Warfel will help you flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users on March 29.

In the Spring, look for Kristina Halvorson to help you with your content strategy and Louis Rosenfeld to dive deep on Search Analytics. And there is much more in the works.

Until December 3, you can still sign your team up for the UIE Virtual Seminar Subscription programs . Not only is it a tremendous savings, but you get the benefit of lifetime access to each recording and the ease of registering and paying just one time.

We also plan to unveil our plan for our User Experience Training Library. Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness.

Have you ever attended a UIE Virtual Seminar? What do you like best about them? How has your team maximized what it gets out of these learning events? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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For our tenth show we bring you a special edition of the Userability Podcast… recorded LIVE from the Voices That Matter 2009 Conference, held in San Francisco in April.

We had two audience questions. The first question asked, are there are any applications or research best practices that Jared and Robert use to aid in persona creation?

The second audience question asked about the the usability of iPhone applications, especially considering that on-the-go, handheld, touchscreen apps are a relatively new concept.

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert duck and dive in front of a live studio audience.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Do you have any persona tricks and tips? What’s your take on the “new” territory of iPhone apps? Is it new territory? Let us know in the comments!

PS— During the show, Robert referenced Apple’s iPhone/mobile Human Interface Guidelines, which are fully available from Apple.

Naturally, our clients’ teams start by focusing on their direct audience. They look to make the best experience for these folks, to make creations come to life quickly and effectively.

It doesn’t take long, once they start researching how their direct users are taking advantage of these tools, to see that not every creation represents the tool well. Quickly, the goal of the team becomes to expand the scope to enhance the lives of what we call the downstream users.

In moving the design focus from the direct audience to the downstream users, we’ve found having robust personas and scenarios helps tremendously. The field research behind the personas involves both the direct users and the downstream users. Scenarios are often interconnected between personas, since the stories describe the direct user’s relationship with their downstream users.

The most successful of our clients in this endeavor have had great luck when they’ve put together a solid vision of what key downstream users experience, then talk about the idealized vision for the direct customers’ development process to reach that experience. The combination of the two viewpoints becomes very powerful.

Joshua Porter (formerly of UIE, but now doing great work on his own at Bokardo Design) recently described much of the latest online debate about the need to develop personas when designing. Josh got a lot of things right, but he got one thing very, very wrong. And, unfortunately, he bases a lot of his argument on that one thing.

Josh said this:

Definition, please?

But while all of this arguing is going on, nobody is really defining what personas are. This, of course, is a big part of the problem. What most definitions don’t say is that personas are a document. They might be a poster, a word file, or a PDF. But they are a document that represents an archetypical person that is passed around design teams. Ok, just wanted to make that clear.

Personas are not a document. Persona descriptions can be a document (or a movie or any other practical rendering). But, those are just renderings of what happened during the persona creation process.

Here’s the way to think of it:

Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums.

While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. The album is just a remnant.

In the UX community, many folks are now saying, “I’ve looked at these documents and they just don’t do anything for me. I don’t think personas are valuable.” Unfortunately, they are judging the value of creating and using robust personas based on the quality of the paper deliverable. If the vacation pictures aren’t compelling, did the vacation itself suck?

To be fair, I think there could be a lot of improvement in the ways people document their personas. Todd Zaki Warfel, over at MessageFirst has some interesting diagrams, though he admits they take a bit of explanation.

Todd Zaki Warfel’s persona description with his Persona DNA chart

Stuart Karten is also doing interesting stuff with his ModeMapping work.

Stuart Karten’s ModeMapping deliverables

However, these are just the final souvenirs, after the team has gained the real value. That value comes when the team visits and observes their target audience, absorbs and discusses their observations, and reduces the chaos into patterns, which then become the personas.

What’s in the team’s head, as they are designing, is what will make a difference in the final design. The persona descriptions are just there to remind everyone what happened.

If you’re amongst those who insist on judging the value of personas on their descriptions, I suggest you cancel your next vacation and just order one of these gift boxes. I’m sure you’ll find it just as valuable as the vacation itself.

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, we follow up our Virtual Seminar presentation on Building Robust Personas In 30 Days or Less, with answers to questions attendees asked during the session. I highly suggest you take a listen. You’ll uncover some wonderful insights even if you didn’t attend the seminar.

During the podcast, Brian Christiansen and I discussed the following topics:

» What are personas?
» Should your organization have dedicated UX team members for maintaining updated personas?
» Can just one person participate in the persona building process?
» Should you develop scenarios for multiple personas that all fit one task?
» Can you create personas based solely on survey results?
» How do personas relate to Actors and Use Cases from the Rational Unified Process (RUP)?

During the podcast, we also mentioned several valuable resources for incorporating personas into the development process:

Steve Mulder’s The User is Always Right

Alan Cooper’s About Face, 3rd edition

Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

John Pruit and Tamara Adlin’s The Persona Lifecycle

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions, just like we did with this episode. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

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We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.

Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale.

We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas. Making decisions based on real opinions trumps making decisions based on imaginary opinions.

I’ve never been a big believer in personas. They’re artificial, abstract, and fictitious. I don’t think you can build a great product for a person that doesn’t exist.

There was a lot of discussion on Jason’s blog, with many sentiments similar to this one from Mimo:

I never heard of Personas before. Now I read it on wikipedia. The idea sounds interesting. But I think at the end of the day it is crap. The product is always shaped by two things. YOUR experience (your present ego and YOUR idea (your future ego).

So, to add into the fray, here’s my thoughts on using personas:

It takes virtually no skill to build something crappy

No one is going to make you use personas. If you create a design without using personas, I’ll promise you the sun will continue to rise on schedule, without variation. The universe will remain intact.

However, how do you know you’re actually meeting the needs of your users? After all, that is why you were designing in the first place, right?

Some products, like the tools built by 37Signals, don’t need personas. Not because the folks at 37Signals have any special powers, but because they themselves are the personas they want to build for. They build tools they like to use themselves. For them, that will work great.

Not all teams have that luxury. A hospital IT team, building software systems used by critical care nurses in the hospital’s pediatric intensitve care unit, are not building tools they will use themselves. They are building tools used by others whose education, experience, goals, contexts, and tasks are extremely different.

A well-built, robust persona set can help educate the IT design team on what it’s like to be a critical care pediatric ICU nurse and the things they need to deal with. This information will inform their designs. And good personas help inform the design process.

Oh My God! They’re Made of People!

In his post, Jason says:

Personas don’t
Personas don’t talk back. Personas can’t answer questions. Personas don’t have opinions. Personas can’t tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. Personas can’t tell you when a sentence doesn’t make sense. Personas don’t get frustrated. Personas aren’t pressed for time. Personas aren’t moody. Personas can’t click things. Personas can’t make mistakes. Personas can’t make value judgements. Personas don’t use products. Personas aren’t real.

People do
People talk back. People answer questions. People have opinions. People can tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. People can tell you when a sentence doesn’t make sense. People get frustrated. People are pressed for time. People are moody. People click things. People make mistakes. People make value judgements. People use products. People are real.

It’s clear that Jason hasn’t used robust personas, because, when designed well, they do all these things. Jason hasn’t had the Soylent Green moment to realize that well-designed and researched personas are made of real people — real people who you can ask questions of, observe their frustrations, and discover their true goals.

I can see where Jason’s coming from. Recently we conducted a study of several dozen organizations who claimed to use personas. Less than 5% actually conducted field research to inform their personas. The remaining 95% just made up the descriptions from internal guesswork.

If you’re just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does.

However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do.

The persona becomes a package for containing what you’ve learned from your field research. A package that is transportable to everyone on the team, so they can have the same benefits of knowing the users as you have.

Once you have well-designed, robust personas, you can take advantage of the benefits that come from them:

• Preventing Grounding
• Using the Oral Tradition
• Role Playing

In our research, teams that utilize robust personas find they create better designs, especially for things they wouldn’t normally use themselves.

I’m going to talk in great length today about building robust personas in our latest virtual seminar. See the description for more information. (It’s available live today and there’s still plenty of room. There will be a recording available shortly.)