We've introduced the idea of personas and how important they are to really get at something substantial, where you're anchoring your user story into a user that really exists that you really understand. And that you are above all able to provide actionable views of two your team as you will collaborate on this pivotal question of what's really going to be valuable to the user. In this video We're going to look at the practice of creating personas and I'll close with an introduction to the template, will be using to actually start formulating these things and designing personas. We talked about how personas are humanized view of who your user is. And this is an example of a bad persona. I see this Kind of persona a lot and it's okay, if this is where you start. But there's a few things here that I would avoid. Number one, this is a gigantic population, women aged 28- 45. Now, even if your market encapsulates a population that large, it's certainly not where you want to start with an innovative new feature in design. We learn to start with the individual and generalize outwards. Also a lot of the traditional views of marketing about working in aggregates and things like that don't work well for design. So for example, we may be less interested in how old these women are and more interested in what they actually do in practice. Like have babies and go to the park, where you could have a young mother and an older mother doing that. Secondly, these bullet points are something that you generally want to avoid. We're not looking to provide little cute shorthand snippets about this persona. We're looking to really create substantial narrative because that's what's actionable. One of the things that I think is really fascinating about the way people work with each other, is how little we probably really understand about what other people are telling us. There's this great story in the book made to stick where they cite this experiment from UCSD. There is one person in this experiment who taps out a song, like row row row your boat. And the job of the other party is to understand what that song was. And the shocking part of the result is that I believe 74% of the tappers, thought that their counter party had understood that song, but actually it was only 7.4%. So think about that for a minute, what would that mean if people are collaborators are only understanding 1/10 of what we actually tell them. And that's why bullet points and these sort of short hands and cliche's do very little to help us drive to valuable outcomes for the user. We need nice, substantial narrative. We need real photos, not stock photos taken off the internet. And maybe the one of the most pernicious things here is that, they responded to a survey online. And we'll talk more about why this doesn't work, but if you ask a customer or user a hypothetical question especially yes or no one. Like, hey, would you like this new feature we're going to build? They're just going to say yes, because they just want to go home or move on or whatever. They know if they say no, you're going to feel bad and they don't want that and you're going to argue with them and they don't want that either. So unfortunately, that is not a thing that we can do to kind of fast forward through this and get to a good answer that's going to help us drive to valuable outcomes. Customer discovery just doesn't work that way. This is an example of the start of a somewhat better persona. And there's a few things I think are better about this one. I really like this little technique, Marry the mom, Andrew the accountant. Every little thing you can do to humanize these personas and avoid the tendency that we have to just make them arbitrary and put corporate speak in. And put in cliché's and shorthand every little thing you can do to help avoid that, is good. And this is one such thing. Also we see full sentences here and this is the beginning of real, actual substantial narrative. And the photo, this is a real photo taken with an iPhone. I made this checklist as a way to think through whether you're in a good place with your personas. Good personas should be vivid. If you hand them to a collaborator or you reread them a week after you created them? You should feel like you know, this user and you can make thoughtful predictions about what kind of shoes would they wear? How would they relate to such and such a feature or even a piece of promotion we're going to do? And then you should be able to loop back through and test those things and that's part of the action ability of personas. If they don't help you make decisions and design ways to test whether what you're producing is valuable, then there's no point in doing these things. Humanizing your work is just another thing you can do to help you drive to valuable outcomes. Like the user story. The only role of these personas is to help you drive strong narrative interdisciplinary collaboration. And if they're not helping you do that, they really have no point. They should be real. The more you're out observing real users and real customers. If you have customers the better off you're going to be with these personas. So rather than talking about do we think Marry the mom would do this or do that. Make some time, make an hour pop outside, go talk to them. Call them up on Skype. Everything, is better than being inside your conference room and arguing about the persona inside the team. All the good answers are out there in the real world. They should be identifiable. So that doesn't mean that they're demographically specific but you should be able to consistently find these people. And a good litmus test for your personas is, can you think of five people that match this persona off the top of your head? That you could go out even if you don't know their name, that you could go back out and find. They should be pretty exact. I mean, people are complicated. If you design something for everybody, you going to end up with something that's bland and that nobody likes. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't ultimately accumulate a lot of customers onto a product. Of course you can, but these personas are a way to drive at specific sources of value that you can test. And if your personas are vague, they will fail you in that way. And they should be pretty detailed. I mean, people are complicated. There's no specific length at which a persona is done of course, it has a lot more to do with how descriptive you are. And whether they're helping you really do all this other stuff, particularly whether they're actionable. My last company leaning systems, we build enterprise Software for communications companies. Companies like France, telecom and Verizon people that offer communications services. And so some of the stuff we built would allow companies to interface with their end users. So these are examples of end users that would use a business phone system, a receptionist and assistant and executive that travels a lot. Maybe he's on his cellphone a lot or she's on her cell phone a lot. So we use these to help inform our work about the end user. And these are enterprise personas where, these are people that would actually work at our customer these communications companies. And you'll notice that there's quite a lot of these. The IT developer for example, this is a very occasional persona that we would only use once in a while. But it's still important because for example, this is someone who would customize our product at the front end of a deployment. Now, are they a regular everyday user? No, but that initial interaction was really important and in practice the persona helped us make some really good decisions about the kind of development environments this person uses. And what tools and what documentation would work for them, because even though they don't use our product on an everyday basis. If they ran into a problem, it would be a huge issue for them. And and a big blocker for us as a company when we were selling the Software and and deploying it.
