Personas 101

Using personas to craft a superior user experience

I dont know the key to success but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby, US comedian

What is a persona?

A persona is a character involved with

your product or service.

A persona typically has a name, a photo,

personal details, and a collection of goals and behaviour-related information. and bring the character to life.

These details make the persona memorable,

Creating and using personas during the design and development process can help your product in many ways.

Why use personas? 1/3

Personas create empathy for the users

of your product.

Users become real people, with real needs

and behaviour. This reduces the likelihood that you will arbitrarily introduce unrealistic features or behaviour into your product.

Why use personas? 2/3

Personas help you align product decisions

to a specific person and behaviour. They can also help resolve disagreements around features by asking Would our persona really behave like this?.

Example: Paul is a salesman who travels almost every week. To ensure easy access to his mail from anywhere, Paul only uses web-based email programs like Ovi Mail. Your product is an email manager that requires daily synchronisation with a hard drive. Will this product really suit Pauls needs and behaviours?

Why use personas? 3/3

Personas help you communicate the reasons Personas combined with scenarios help you This type of information can be useful in

behind your design decisions to stakeholders. tell the story of your productwho will use it, when, and most importantly, why. obtaining buy-in from stakeholders, but can also assist early marketing efforts.

Getting started

Where to find personas

Personas should ideally be based on

real people, with similar goals or behaviour that you have met throughout your design research. of your personas, try to base them on people that you personally know, or have observed in the past.

If you have no research to inform the creation

What about demographic groups?

Demographics is the statistical study of a When creating personas, avoid focussing

on demographic factors, unless they are specifically relevant to your product.

population using factors such as age, gender, income, schooling, and occupation.

Example 1/5
Meet Mary and Selena

Example 2/5
Mary, 21 years old Brussels, Belgium
Occupation: Mary is studying to be a dentist. Music habits: Mary has a large music collection but is a casual music listener. She most often listens to music while exercising and traveling to University by train. She enjoys listening to the same albums over and over, so she doesnt spend much time creating playlists.

Example 3/5
Selena, 21 years old Paris, France
Occupation: Selena is studying law. Music habits: Selena is crazy about music. She has a huge, carefully organised collection of albums spanning many genres. She also loves live music. She and her friends attend gigs and concerts every weekend and often take photos of the performances, which they then share amongst themselves.

Example 4/5
Demographics dont matter for Mary and Selena Mary and Selena are the same age, same gender, live in major European cities, and are both studying at University. When it comes to music however, they have very different needs and behaviour. A music service which only focusses on their demographics (i.e. young, urban, well educated women who enjoy music), will not necessarily tap into the factors that could make Mary and Selena fall in love with the service.

Example 5/5
Should we completely ignore demographics? Only focus on demographic factors that are specifically relevant to your product.
Example: Your product is a subscription-based entertainment service. Your research has shown that young people aged 14-24 love to follow entertainment news and watch related trailers or videos. In this case your personas age is quite relevant. With no credit card, how will a 14-year-old pay for the monthly subscription?

Creating your personas

What to include

a photo name, age, gender location family ties profession lifestyle

These simple and primarily demographic details provide context, put a face to the name, and bring the character to life.

What to include

personality traits media and technology

choices

goals, behaviour or differentiators

motivations in relation to life, and to your product

These details truly differentiate one persona from another, and will turn them into real persons in the eyes of your team. They will also inform how your product could fit into the persons life.

The differentiator

Each persona should be representative

of a common user of your productbut should have one factor that differentiates them from the others. It should be common enough that it will actually matter to your product.

This factor should not be an edge case.

Edge case or differentiator? 1/2

Paul is a performance artist. He likes to play music tracks backwards during his performances and would like a music service that enables him to listen to tracks this way.
Is this an edge case? Pauls behaviour illustrates the value of design research. Chances are, his behaviour is too rare to consider in your product design, but through user research, you might already have come to this conclusion by talking to other music lovers.

Edge case or differentiator? 2/2

Simon is a music lover. He has a huge collection of music which he shares with his wife. She likes to organise music by release date, while Simon prefers to organise it by mood (for instance happy, romantic).
A product decision for Simons persona Introducing a tagging system would enable Simon to tag and find his songs by mood, while also enabling his wife to do so by release date. Research will likely confirm that most users would appreciate this level of flexibility.

How many personas do you need?

Two or three personas are often enough to If needed, you can create more than three.

suit all the critical activities and behaviour your product is meant to support. However, keep in mind that the more people you try to satisfy with one product, the harder it will be to truly please any of them.

Example: Three personas

An email program may have three personas.
The Beginner This person is new to the software, and needs to set up an account and send an initial message. The power-user This person requires advanced features such as filters, conversation views, and signatures. The occasional user This person rarely uses email and may have forgotten how the product works.

Organising personas

Where possible, choose a primary and

secondary persona.

Your primary persona represents the goals Your goal when designing the product is to
fully satisfy all this personas needs.

of most of your users. This persona will guide most of the product and feature decisions.

The secondary persona

Secondary personas may have similar goals

as the primary persona, but there will always be a differentiator. may not completely suit the primary persona, but should not inconvenience them.

Features designed for the secondary persona

The opposite should of course also be true. Features that help a persona complete a task, while inconveniencing one of the other personas, should be reconsidered.

Example: Organising personas

You are designing a mobile email application aimed at the enterprise market.
Primary persona: The power-user This persona requires advanced features such as filters, multiple accounts, and conversation views. Secondary persona: The beginner This persona is new to the software, and needs to set up an account and send an initial message. A wizard which appears when the application is first launched could help this user achieve those goals while not getting in the way of the primary persona.

Using personas

When to create personas

If youre informing your design through If youre unable to do research, create

research, create your personas once the research is complete and base them on people you have interviewed or observed. preliminary personas based on people you know, then revise the personas as you gain additional insights through research, user testing, or observation.

How to use personas

Share personas with your entire team. Use personas in your product scenarios.

Think about whether this persona would behave as your scenario suggests, and be sure to create scenarios involving all your personas in some way. Print them out, bring them to meetings, and place them on the wall along with project scenarios.

Where possible, live with the personas.

Appendix: Persona examples

A series of personas for a social music service. The service provides users with access to millions of songs, and enables them to create playlists which they can share with friends.

Primary persona: Selena

The fan 1/2

Music is why I live in a big city. I spend my weekends in clubs and met most of my friends at concerts. My life outside of school, is all music, all the time.

Name: Selena Age: 21 Location: Paris, France Occupation: Selena is studying law. Personality: Optimistic, highly social, and exploratory. Income: Selena lives in a flat with two of her friends. The flat is paid for by her friends father who works as an estate agent, so Selenas only costs are food and utilities. She also receives a monthly allowance from her parents, which she primarily spends on entertainment. Devices: Selena has a Nokia N97, which she chose for its QWERTY keyboard and home screen widgets. These come in handy when coordinating her busy social life using SMS and a variety of social networking services.

The fan 2/2

Musical tastes: Selena seeks out every indie band she can find, but also enjoys vintage blues and jazz. Shes always willing to sample music recommended by her friends, but draws the line at pop which she feels is for kids. Life: School is a big part of Selenas life, but it certainly can be hard to get up in the morning after a night out with friends. Selena plans to focus more on entertainment law next year, with the goal of obtaining an internship with one of the major music labels. Live music: Selena attends lots of live performances and loves to take pictures of the performers and the crowd. She recently bought a professional auto-focus camera but finds that when the time comes to go out, she usually leaves it behind. After all, her trusted N97 takes great photos, and is always in her pocket.

Secondary persona: Mary

The casual listener 1/2

Im too busy to organise musicbesides, it doesnt matter to me. I only buy albums I really like so dont mind listening to them over and over.

Name: Mary Age: 21 Location: Brussels, Belgium Occupation: Mary is a studying to be a dentist. Personality: Practical, playful, and sentimental. Income: Mary comes from a single-parent family, so she has qualified for a student grant, which pays for her tuition, apartment, and day-to-day expenses. She also works 15 hours a week as a clerk in a veterinary clinic. She uses this additional income to buy clothes and go out on weekends, and is saving a small portion every month for a summer trip to Portugal. Devices: Mary has a Nokia 5000. She loves it because its small, has a nice music player, and can be hidden in her pocket while in class or at work. The FM radio is also handy for catching the news at break times.

The casual listener 2/2

Musical tastes: Mary enjoys classical, jazz, folk but also some top artists in the pop charts. Despite her varied tastes, shes isnt experimental with music. Once she finds an album she likes, she listens to it over and over. Mary would love a way to carry more music, but she isnt ready to buy a separate music player or change mobiles. Lifestyle: School and work currently occupy most of Marys life. The fact that Mary lives in suburban Brussels doesnt help matters, as she spends close to two hours commuting every day. Any free time is spent with her boyfriend who luckily attends the same university. Exercise: Exercise helps Mary relax, and with an erratic schedule, her activity of choice is running. On busy days, she runs to the train station instead of taking the bus, or goes for a run during her lunch break. She always listens to music while exercising, but the music has to be just right, otherwise she finds it distracting.

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