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.
