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Personas I: What They Are; How They're Used

Course video 15 of 24

The 3rd and 4th week of the course are intended to be a unit, with more lecture content in week 3, and more practice (assignment and quizzing) in week 4.

User Research and Design

Université du Minnesota

Cours 2 de 5 dans Conception d'interfaces utilisateur Spécialisation

In this course you will learn and practice techniques of user research and early UI design exploration. First, you will learn and practice several techniques for user research, including in-person research and survey and log-analysis techniques. Then, you will learn to analyze and deliver user research in forms that support UI design, including personas, use cases, tasks, and scenarios. Finally, you will learn and practice ideation techniques that start from user research and broadly generate potential design ideas.

Visualiser le programme de cours

Enseigné par

Loren Terveen
Professor
Haiyi Zhu
Assistant Professor
Lana Yarosh
Assistant Professor
Dr. Brent Hecht
Assistant Professor
Joseph A Konstan
Distinguished McKnight Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor

Transcription

Welcome back everybody.

I'm Loren.

Here's Joe.

In this video, we're going to take a deeper look at a concept

that we introduced in an earlier video, namely personas.

So let's review quickly.

What we told you before is that a persona

is a construct that is based on user research, and it's a narrative description

of a synthetic user that represents an important usage pattern.

And it's determined by taking your user research data and

clustering it, finding important patterns of usage, and then coming up with this

description of a synthetic user that encapsulates the important pattern.

So let me give you some more details about the concept of personas.

So the origin of this

concept of persona came from a person named Alan Cooper who is a designer.

He's been around for a long time.

He wrote a book called The Inmates are Running The Asylum,

which first really popularized the concept.

And I think it's useful to point out that this was developed in a practical setting,

in a business setting, not an academic setting.

And so what you'll see is this a very sort of practical business oriented concept,

rather than a formal academic one.

Now, personas are realistic and specific.

They capture important details of a realistic group of users and

group of usage that are an important way of communicating to

designers what they should keep in mind when they're designing.

Now typically there's multiple personas for any application and

each of these represents a key usage pattern.

And this is important because it helps you remember that when you're designing

an application you're not designing it for everybody.

You're not designing it for some vaguely invasion user group.

Instead, there's probably a few key constituencies or

usage patterns that you need to keep in mind when you're designing.

Now, we might think of a few particular types of

things you would put in when you're talking about a persona.

Demographic information like age, gender,

education, level things like that and that's important.

But you also want to put in other more rich information.

The motivations, the needs, the tasks, the goals of a particular usage group.

And personas tell a story.

They describe why people do what they do.

What they're after and

really personas are super useful in design, because they help designers focus.

They provide a context for design decisions.

They let designers say, would this person,

Anna is the name of the persona we're going to come up with in a minute.

Would Anna be able to do this task?

Would she understand this?

And it turns out that's very useful.

>> And personas can even be used when you're thinking later about testing and

saying, well, who should I be recruiting for my tests and

what things should I be having them do.

I often think about the failures here and

we at the university suffer from financial systems.

And one could imagine that somehow out there the people who designed

these systems which will go nameless but sell for

millions of dollars across thousand of customers.

So they're big.

That they probably imagined, well, what do we want to make sure that

the human resources department has for finances and payroll.

And maybe, what do we want to make sure that the management has?

But when we, humble faculty members, try to use these systems,

it seems like, none of the designers were ever thinking about us.

And we, sort of, wished that they had put together a persona of a sympathetic and

humble faculty member.

So that as they were designing things they might have had those thoughts of wait,

maybe what we're designing isn't going to be usable by that really sympathetic

character that we have hanging up on the wall.

>> And we could even give that sympathetic and humble faculty member a name,

but maybe we shouldn't at this point, right?

>> Maybe not this time.

>> Okay, good.

Okay, so what goes in a persona?

So a bunch of key, specific information.

What is the role or

group that we're representing with this persona-like web manager?

A name and a photo.

Again, we're being very concrete.

The job title, major responsibilities.

Demographic information.

Key stuff about this person, age, education, ethnicity, family status.

Again, we really want to get it higher level or more fundamental information

like the goals and tasks they will be trying to complete using this application.

A concept that's really important is their pain points, their needs,

the challenges that they face.

What are they trying to overcome?

You might be able to help them with this application.

The physical, social, technological environments of this person.

For example, are they the kind of people who sit in their desk all day?

Or are they on the go?

Do they work alone or with other people?

Things like that.

A very powerful thing is a day in the life narrative.

Sort of what is their flow like through the day?

What are their typical activities?

And then, a crucial thing, is a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona

as it relates to this application.

A little tag line, the designers can keep in mind to help them focus on

meeting the needs of this persona.

>> Now as you're thinking about this of course, we understand you'll recognize

these personas might be geared towards a work application.

Now if you were designing Pokemon Go you might worry less about

whether somebody was a web manager, or a warehouse worker.

Worry more about the depth of their Pokemon hobby and whether they still

have all of the cards that they collected or whether they're new to the game.

The key is to get the information that's really relevant

as you're thinking about this as a real type of person.

Even if they were representative of a group.

>> Yeah, and one other important point

to make about personas as I said this is typical information in a persona.

There is no prescription.

There's no required definition of what is or is not.

What can and cannot be in persona whether this is best practice.

And so you can follow this but, of course,

put in variation as its appropriate for your application.

So let's talk a little bit about developing personas, and in this example,

the next few slides that I'm going to go through,

I'm going to use some information from Smashing magazine, which is a website that

provides good information for web designers and developers.

So I've got a few URL's that you can go consult if you want more information.

Now the examples that I'm going to walk through for

a bit are following a made up medical software application.

So at points I'll sort of refer to concepts like doctors and so

on and that's why because we're thinking about a medical software application.

So when you think about developing personas really think about

beginning with user research which we've spent a lot of time on in the past.

So you have to identify your users first.

And if you're thinking about a medical software application your users will

probably include different work roles like doctors and

nurses, hospital administrators, things like that.

So make sure that you have users from all those roles that you're going to do

research with.

You next need to decide what and how to ask.

What is it you're trying to find out based on what you know what you

think you need to learn, and how are you going to gather the information you need.

In business uses the typical method used is a combination of interview and

observation, which is really good which is really effective, but

as we'll see in the next video anyway that you can get use a research.

Whether it's finding quantitative data, doing surveys,

doing log analysis can be valuable input for developing a persona.

You then, of course, have to gather the data and then coming into

the last couple steps which are more specific to persona development

you have to analyze the data and produce the persona description.

Now for analyzing the data, what you typically do is define

a set of attributes that you can place the user responses on and

then you cluster together the users as to how they respond and

those then became the basis for the personas.

And I'm going to talk about these next two steps in a bit more detail.

Again, analyzing the data in the context of developing medical software

applications.

Now, what you will typically find

as you analyze the data is a set of attributes will emerge.

And in this example, we see a set of attributes that made sense for

this hypothetical medical software application like,

how often to somebody conduct surgery?

Let's see.

I'm having a hard time actually seeing this.

Okay, that's great.

Do they prefer older techniques for surgery or

do they prefer newer or cutting edge techniques?

Do they work on a small team or do they work in a large team?

So those are the kinds of attributes that you might find emerging from your data.

And then as you see that those attributes you can start to place the different

user responses on these spectrums.

And so as you do that, you then start to see patterns, you start to see clusters.

So if we look through these we see, let's see Tiffany and

Sam are two users that are starting to cluster together a lot.

And we see Elliot, Dan, and

Whitney as three other users that are starting to cluster together a lot.

And so we observe those patterns, and

those clusters start to form the basis for personas, and once you have that,

you can then look at the information that you know about those users.

And start to develop, well,

what are the demographic characteristics that really characterize,

the key demographic characteristics that characterize Tiffany and Sam?

What are their key goals?

And so on.

And that gives you a good basis for writing your personas.

>> And I think something you should notice here is these don't have to be perfect.

So Tiffany and Sam cluster together, but they have exactly

opposite views on the tried and true methods and the cutting-edge methods.

Tiffany's at the cutting edge, though, I don't know,

as a patient I might think the cutting edge was the old way and

the lasers are the new way, but we won't make that joke here.

But Sam likes tried and

true well surgery procedures that have been refined overtime.

That doesn't mean we can't recognized that they mostly cluster together and

create a single persona that may represent Tiffany and

Sam and may represent one of them slightly better than the other.

>> Right, absolutely.

And it's also worth pointing out, when we say clustering here,

often when personas are developed in practice, the clustering is done manually.

People are doing it, the designers are doing it, and

observing how they think the data fit together.

Some of you may have a background with using automated clustering

techniques which in some cases if you have quantitative data,

you could try those techniques to develop the basis for your personas.

And then let's take a look at, let's go on to the next one.

>> One more time.

>> There we are, let's take a look at an example.

This is an example now in a different domain

outside the Medical Software Domain.

I think first simple writing application.

And I just wanted to show you this very briefly.

To give you an idea of the actual richness and specificity of a persona.

We see a photo.

We see the name Fred Fish.

We see the job title, Corporate Chef.

We see a quote underneath that that says get me out of the office and

into the kitchen.

And key types of information underneath that.

We see the key goals and a day in the life.

And by reading through the key goals we can see

this is what Fred is trying to achieve.

And a day in the life gives us an idea of what are the typical

activities that Fred goes through and what does he like to go through?

We sort of close the persona with a little quote at the bottom right that,

again, encapsulates some of the key aspects of the persona.

And on the left side,

we see a few basic pieces of information about things like computer use and so on.

This is a good example of the kind of richness and

specificity that makes a persona useful.

And as we've said once you have a persona that looks like this

in your design conversation you can say things like would Fred Fish be able to

figure out how to use this application.

Would Fred be able to be happy using this, since he doesn't like to

seat in the office, instead he likes to be out in the kitchen?

And that is it for this lecture.

We took a deeper look at personas.

And in the next lecture,

we'll take you through an example of developing a persona from user research.

>> Look forward to seeing you there.

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