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A persona, first introduced by
Alan Cooper, defines an archetypical user of a system,
an example of the kind of person who would interact with
it. The idea is that if you want to design
effective software, then it needs to be designed
for a specific person. For the bank, potential personas could be named
Frances Miller and Ross Williams. In other words,
personas represent fictitious people which are based on
your knowledge of real users. |
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You’re likely familiar with actors. Unlike actors, personas
are not roles which people play. In
use case modeling actors represent the roles that
users, and even other systems, can take with respect to
your system. For example, in a banking application we
would have actors such as Customer and Credit Card
Processor. Actors are often documented by a sentence or
two describing the role. For example the description
for Customer might read “A person or organization which
does business with the bank.”
Personas are different because they describe an
archetypical instance of an actor. In a use case
model we would have a Customer actor, yet with personas
we would instead describe several different types of
customers to help bring the idea to life.
It is quite common to see a page or two of
documentation written for each persona. The goal is to
bring your users to life by developing personas with
real names, personalities, motivations, and often even a
photo. In other words, a good persona is highly
personalized. For example, Figure 1
depicts a persona description for Frances Miller.
Notice how it includes a photo which helps to make the
persona more real.
Figure 1. An example persona.
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Frances Miller
Sixty-seven year-old Frances is the
mother of four children and the
grandmother of twelve. She lives in her
own home, bakes a pie once a week so
that she has something to serve for
Sunday visitors (usually one of her
children and their immediate family),
and has two cats. The cats’ names are
Fred and Wilma, names given to them by
four-year old grandson Bobby. She likes
to knit and do needlework, which she
either gives away as presents to her
family or donates to the annual sale to
raise money for the church she belongs
to.
Every morning she goes for a one hour
walk along the lake front when the
weather is good. On bad days she’ll go
with her neighbor to the local mall
where a group of senior citizens “Mall
Stroll” each morning before sitting down
at one of the restaurants for coffee or
tea. For breakfast Frances prefers a
cup of Earl Grey tea and two slices of
whole-wheat toast with her own home-made
preserves. Lunch is typically a bowl of
soup or a sandwich and then she’ll have
the opposite for dinner.
She is a middle-class retiree living on
a fixed income. Her mortgage has been
paid off and she has one credit card
which she seldom uses. She has been a
customer of the bank for 57 years
although has never used an automated
teller machine (ATM) and never intends
to. She has no patience for phone
banking and does not own a computer.
Every Monday at 10:30 am she will visit
her local bank branch to withdraw enough
cash for the week. She prefers to talk
with Selma the branch manager or with
Robert, a CSR who was a high-school
friend of her oldest son. |
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You will want to develop several personas, perhaps
seven or eight initially for the banking system, to
ensure that you explore all the needs of your user
base. To write personas effectively you will need to do
some form of user community research to ensure you truly
understand your users. You might want to consider
holding a focus group with potential users, talking with
your customer support people (support staff often have a
very good idea as to what end users need), or with
product managers whose job is to understand your user
community.
Personas are incredibly useful when you don’t have
easy access to real users because they act as “user
stand-ins”, helping to guide your decisions about
functionality and design. Questions like “How would
Ross use this feature” or “Would Frances even be
interested in this?” can start great conversations
within your team, getting you to think the way that your
users actually would. Personas are often used when
building publicly accessed web-based software, such as
the Amazon or eBay systems, as well as shrink-wrapped
software. In fact, personas and
usage scenarios are very popular at
Microsoft and are one of the artifacts described in
their
Agile MSF process. In short, personas are one of
a range of modeling techniques which you want to have in
your intellectual toolkit.
In
The Inmates Are Running the
Asylum, Alan Cooper suggests
the following techniques for
writing effective personas:
- You don't "make up"
personas, but instead
discover them as a byproduct
of your
requirements investigation
process.
- Write specific personas:
you will have a much greater
degree of success designing
for a single person.
The "generic user" will bend
and stretch to meet the
moment, but your true goal
should be to develop
software which bends and
stretches. Your
personas should "wiggle"
under the pressure of
development.
- You want to know what
the persona's goals are so
that you can see what your
system needs to do, and not
do.
- Sometimes you want to
identify negative personas,
people that you are not
designing for.
- A primary persona is
someone who must be
satisfied but who cannot be
satisfied by a user
interface that is designed
for another persona.
- If you identify more
than three primary personas
your scope is likely too
large.
- You want a finite number
of personas, your goal is to
narrow down the people that
you are designing the system
for.
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