09 Sep 2007 1020H

On personas, part 1

Who are our users? What do they come to our site to accomplish? What are they looking for?

This last month, aside from the usual dance of the wireframes required of me at another client, I’ve been practicing the fine art (though some might call it a dark art) and science of creating personas for the web.

As a quick intro to those who don’t do this type of work, let’s talk about what personas are and why we use them. Personas are fictional representative users, based on representative data and observations of real target user groups or “neighborhoods,” in which the persona lives. A persona is different from the demographic segmentation used in marketing, because the persona includes goals and needs, pain points, and behaviors, so the methodology is cognate, but slightly different.

We use personas to align a team of client stakeholders and our own team of designers, developers and other team members in what our assumptions are about those users and what their behaviors are in order to guide us to design something, whether it’s a new product, or a new website, basically, really almost anything where we have people interacting with something.

This was necessary because all too often in the design process various people involved with the design, either a stakeholder, project manager, or a designer, or a developer, or even an IA, would project their own inner desires, behaviors, and wishes on the project, which may or may not be representative of the audience involved, and insert themselves as target users.

Or it may be because there was no alignment about who the user is to begin with, who the targeted user is, and that is a larger issue. This is in fact the same as saying that the user is infinitely flexible and therefore, the persona is everyone, because products should be relevant for everyone and everything and for all times and contexts and places. That’s not true, unless it’s air, and even air has specific times, uses, and contexts for use, when you think about it.

Sometimes we are users of the product because we live in the world and we act upon it and are acted upon it just like everyone else. It is true also that we live in an age and place where the most important person in our own little world is oftentimes “me.” But by focusing so exclusively on ourselves we miss out on a much larger world and all the people who are not us, and thereby miss out on a much greater opportunity to make a product relevant, engaging, and useful to a more significant portion of a population, and that can only happen by understanding the behaviors, wishes, and goals of groups. And that’s the same by saying our products are for everyone. By making a product for everyone, history reveals that these products satisfy few people, and thereby we miss the opportunity to create a product which inspires passion in people.

Therein lies the problem with personas. For on occasion, once created, the persona is too successful. By too successful, I mean that people involved with a project want to focus too much on the narrative and not the data. They want to focus on the person in the persona themselves. This is logical since the narrative and the accompanying picture of this user is cuddly, unlike the data that allows us to paint this portrait. But then, these stakeholders assume, like finding the mythical One Who Shall Guide Us to Victory, that all other searching is no longer necessary.

That would be shortsighted. I’ll explain why in subsequent entries.

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