The Designers Toolkit: Personas

In ‘The Designers Toolkit’, we take time to pull back the curtain and reveal some of the tools that we use to create better web sites. 

A persona is a user archetype we use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood—we can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype. In most cases, personas are synthesized from a series of ethnographic interviews with real people in the target audience, then captured in 1-2 page sketches that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life. For each web site there is a small set of personas, one of whom is the primary focus for the design.

A good persona description is not a list of tasks or duties; it’s a narrative that describes their life, as well as their skills, attitudes, environment, and goals. A persona answers critical questions that a job description or task list doesn’t, such as: which pieces of information are required at what points in the day? Do users focus on one thing at a time, carrying it through to completion, or are there a lot of interruptions? Why are they visiting this web site in the first place?

Designing for personas is a very useful discipline, because it focuses the design process on something realistic, instead of an infinite range of possibilities. It also helps us go beyond a site design that is only functionally complete, and visualize the qualitative factors that will really make a difference to success. Another positive aspect of using personas is that they give us a way to empathize with the end-users which can lead to key insights that improve the experience for everyone.

Start the sketch

Developing a persona begins with a name, a face and their age. Then we add a career, family and life situation followed by hobbies and interests. Depending on the context of the project, this will then be supplemented with additional relevant information: computer experience, technical savvy, web usage etc. Once we have the critical information, we like to add just one or two personal details, such as what a persona does after work or what personal touches there are in her workspace. Without a little bit of personality, personas can easily turn into ‘elastic users’ instead of precise design targets. The elastic user manifests different priorities at different times and this fictional “User” might be a geek power-user at one moment, or an elderly first-time visitor with poor eyesight the next, the end result can be a jumble of features that doesn’t really suit anyone’s real needs. Ideally, the details for all of this will be drawn from reality, while respecting the privacy of the individuals involved. 

Once the rough sketch is complete, we share it with clients and stakeholders since they will often have valuable insights into the “personality” of the persona and can help us iron the details. 

Karen Ferguson

Background

Karen is a 32 year old, single woman living in El Segundo, near LAX in California. At 5’ 11’’ she is tall, with an athletic build. She has blonde hair and green eyes. She got divorced when she was 29 and does not have children. She currently lives alone with her dog, Jeremy. Karen is a graduate of UCLA were she received a degree in Literature. She works at Hughes Aircraft, a 10-minute drive from her home. Her title is Partnership Director. She works with Hughes suppliers and customers and is considered a supply chain expert. Her hobbies include photography, yoga, running and eating out. Her favorite restaurant is Cha Cha Chicken in Santa Monica. She enjoys movies and loves reading in coffee shops. Karen drives a 2003 Toyota Highlander.

Web Usage  

Karen’s internet usage is limited to work because she does not have a computer at home. She has a Gmail account that she uses to keep in touch with friends. She checks this a couple of times a day. Because of her job, Karen considers herself proficient with the web but she doesn’t like to spend more time sitting at the computer than she has to so she prefers web sites that let her get things done with the minimum of distraction. 

Online Shopping

Karen prefers to touch and feel things before buying so she only has limited experience of online shopping. She does use e-commerce sites to gather information, read reviews and compare prices. 

Marketing and sales targets may not be design targets 


Many product managers and executives are surprised when there isn’t a direct correlation between market segments and personas. The people who bring in the most revenue may not be the best design target. If we were designing an in-flight entertainment system, a frequent business traveler—every airline’s most valued customer—would be a tempting design target. A business traveler would actually make a poor design target, though, because he would be too familiar with flying and with using computers and other gadgets. If we design for the business traveler, the retired bricklayer going to see his grandchildren won’t be able to use the system. If we design for the bricklayer, the business traveler will also be happy.

A small cast


If you’ve ever read a book or watched a movie with an enormous cast of characters, you may have found it hard to remember who was related to whom, who said what, and so on. You probably didn’t feel like you knew any of the characters very well. That’s why a large set of personas is problematic—the personas all blur together.

Ideally, we try to create minimum number of personas required to illustrate key goals and behavior patterns. For example, if we were creating an electronic family calendar, the persona set might include a career mom, a stay-at-home mom, a career dad, and a teenager. If the career mom has the same needs as the career dad, and also does all the family management the stay-at-home mom does, then we would eliminate both the dad and stay-at-home mom personas.

Primary personas

Within a set of personas, a primary character emerges who’s, “… needs must be met, but whose needs cannot be met through an interface designed for any other persona.”

Primary personas provide test cases that deliver the desired results for the complete breadth and depth of use contexts. In simpler projects, they can give a “lowest common denominator” whose needs have to meet, but deliver a lot more besides: a way to model the web site as it will be used in the real world, and to test design decisions with confidence.

Use the right goals

Each persona should have three or four important goals that help focus the design. Not just any goals will do, though, so it’s important to understand which types will help when it comes down to making design decisions:

Life goals are only occasionally useful in design. For example, “Retire by age 45″ would be of little use if we’re designing an ice cream web site, but it may offer valuable insight when coming up with a financial planning tool.

Experience goals describe how the persona wants to feel when using a product; having fun and not feeling stupid are experience goals. Not every persona needs an experience goal; in most persona sets, there is one persona who represents people with a lot of anxiety about technology. One of this person’s goals is to avoid feeling stupid. Other experience goals might center on the product domain. A persona using an online banking site, for example, might want to feel confident that his transactions are secure.

End goals may involve the work product that results from using the tool. If a manager wants to be more proactive, a better spreadsheet tool can help her achieve this goal if it makes her more efficient.

Scenarios

A scenario is a complete journey from first point of contact with a web site, right through to a goal being achieved (hopefully). Like personas, scenarios work best when they’re based on known facts about real users, rather than imaginative guesswork. 

To this end, we devise a few realistic, typical scenarios for each persona and record notes on each one:

• Where are they when they’re interacting with the web site. Are they at work? At home? In an airport?
• What other factors impact the persona’s context of use? What speed of internet connection do they have? How much time do they have? What distractions are there?
• What specific goal is driving the persona to interact with the web site on this occasion? What event triggered this scenario?
• What considerations will be foremost in the persona’s mind? What clues are they looking for in particular?

Putting Personas to Work

Personas and Scenarios help us in many ways:

• For surrogate user testing.
• To help advocate for users.
• To communicate user needs.
• To evaluate new features.
• To help make design decisions.
• To help weigh business decisions.
• For task analysis and use cases.
• For customer service scripts.

Want to know more? 

As you can tell, web design is a lot more than creating attractive interfaces. If you would like to know more about personas and how they can help us to redesign your web site, please contact us. If you have an idea for the next Designers Toolbox article then please let us know.

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