Using Personas to Guide User-Centered Design

Using Personas to Create User-centered Designs

Allison Bloodworth, Senior User Interaction Designer, Educational Technology Services, University of California - Berkeley
Rachel Hollowgrass, Kuali Student UX Lead, University of California - Berkeley
May 7, 2008

Agenda
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What is user-centered design?
What are personas?
Gathering data about users
Creating personas
Using personas in the design & development
process

What is user-centered design?
• User-centered design is a product development
methodology based on actual user needs, abilities and
perceptions.
• User-centered design is used by UC Berkeley because it
offers the most effective path to useful and usable
products.
• Personas put a human face on the amorphous “user”
because they are based on actual user needs. They save
time by focusing development toward real cases and
away from unlikely “edge” cases.

What’s in it for me?
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Programmers benefit from personas and user-centered design by
not having to write code that is not needed by the target users.
Who wants to make something that won't be used?
Business analysts benefit from personas and user-centered
design because the scope of goals and tasks is well-defined for
them. They don't have to imagine or invent.

User-centered design at
Berkeley
• Focuses on understanding:
– Who are the users?
– What are their goals?
• Goals drive a person’s actions
• Tasks are things a person does in order to
accomplish his goals
– What are their pain points?
– What are their motivations?
• To drive design

Why focus on goals vs.
tasks/do user research/UCD?
• “The way people do things today is often merely the
product of the obsolete systems and and organizations
they are forced to interact with, and typically bear little
resemblance to the way they would like to do things, or
they way they would be most effective.”
– About Face 3.0

• Just putting existing processes on-line often is not enough
to help users achieve their goals

Berkeley
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User Research
Modeling
Requirements Definition
UI Framework Deﬁnition
UI Design
Development Support

❁ User Research ❁ Modeling ❁ Requirements Definition ❁ UI Framework Definition ❁ UI Design ❁ Development Support

Berkeley


Berkeley (cont’d)


User Research
• Ethnography and empathic research
– Observation & interviews
• Study users in their context
• Centered on users goals and activities
• Look for patterns


Modeling
• Make sense of research findings
– Personas
– Use Cases
– Activity Diagrams
• Gain consensus early on…before any design happens
• Shared language & vision


Requirements Deﬁnition
• Refined based on:
– User needs
– Business goals
– Customer needs

• Scenarios


UI Framework Deﬁnition
• High level design
– What pages do we have?
– What panes need to exist within the pages and how do
they work together.
– What design elements are included in each page, pane,
etc.

• Holistic Design
• Allows for iterating on the details


UI design
“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose
meaningful order”
• Interaction design AND visual design
– How does it behave?
– What does it look like?
– How does it make users feel?

• Wireframes and/or mock-ups


Development Support
• Constant communication
– No throwing it over the wall

• Constant iterations as we learn more from
development


What are personas?
• Basic definition
– “A persona is a user archetype you can use to help
guide decisions about product features, navigation,
interactions, and even visual design.” - Kim Goodwin,
Cooper

• User models
– Models can consolidate complex information into an
(easy to remember) abstraction
– Remembering & making sense of all the raw data would
be impossible


Persona: Sarah Windsor,
Overwhelmed Faculty

Source: Sakai


What are personas?
• Should:
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be based on user research
be based primarily on qualitative research
be focused on users’ goals
be based on common behavior patterns
be specific to your design context or problem
come to life, and seem like real people

• Should not:
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be focused on stereotypes or generalizations
be an ‘average’ of observed behavior patterns
be based (at least solely) on user roles
be based only on information gathered from subject matter
experts, as they cannot represent end users


Why use personas?
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Focus
Empathy
Gaining consensus
Avoiding the elastic user


Why use personas?
• Focus
– Designing for too many different types of users makes a
product too complex to truly satisfy any of them
– Pleasing some users often conflicts with pleasing
others
– Avoid focusing the design on edge cases


Why use personas?
• Empathy
– People are wired to be attuned to other people
– Helps put yourself in the users’ shoes
• Helps avoid self-referential design

– Facilitates the use of role playing to:
• make design decisions
• evaluate designs


Why use personas?
• Gaining consensus
– Give the team a shared understanding (early on!) of
who they users are and what they need
• Without personas, the team may be disagreeing about who
the users are, rather than actual design decisions, without
even knowing it

– Gives the team a tool to reason through design
decisions


Why use personas?
• Avoiding the elastic user
– If the users haven’t been clearly defined, they may
stretch to fit the needs of the product team
• “Our students are very tech-savvy, and will certainly be able
to figure that out.”
• “Students won’t be able to understand this, we need to
create a wizard.”


Types of personas
• Design Personas
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User Personas
Customer Personas
Served Personas
Provisional Personas
Negative Personas

• Other types of Personas
– Marketing Personas
– Strategy Personas
– Organization Personas


Types of personas
• Primary persona
– a persona whose needs must be satisfied
– Multiple primary personas require separate interfaces

• Secondary, tertiary, etc. personas
– Personas whose needs should be considered after those of the
primary persona(s)
– a persona is made secondary because their needs can be
mostly met if the design is focused on the primary persona

• Use a bullseye model to keep visualize the different
personas & their relationship to each other


Gathering information for
personas
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User observation
Contextual inquiries
Interviews
Focus groups
Existing data
Existing knowledge


Personas should contain
information on…
• Goals
• Attitudes (related to your context)
• Behaviors & Tasks (in your context)
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Photo
Name
Tagline
Demographic info
Skill level
Environment

• Scenarios

Persona: Matthew Johnson,
USDA Senior Manager

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS).


How are personas created?
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Persona hypothesis
User research
Identify behavioral variables/attributes
Persona scales
Choose personas
Write personas
Communicate personas


Persona hypothesis
• A starting point to help determine what types of users to
research
– Differentiate users based on needs and behaviors
– More user types can be added later if research points to other
types

• Should be based on hypothesized behavior patterns
• Should be based on information gathered from
stakeholders, SME’s and review of existing literature
• Should not be based purely on demographics
• Often map to roles in a non-consumer domain (e.g.
education)


User research
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Interview & observe users in the context of their work
Use focus structure document to guide each user visit
Take detailed notes & photos
Process ‘raw’ notes into a more categorized & synthesized
format
Create summaries


Persona: Michael the Moderately
Seasoned Professional

Source: Todd Warfel "Data Driven Personas"


Identify variables
• Personas should be based on observed behavior patterns
• Identify the behavioral variables which differentiated your
interviewees
• Two by two comparison - UIE.com method
– Read two randomly chosen summaries
– List attributes that make interviewees similar & different
– Replace one of the summaries with another randomly chosen
one
– Repeat until all summaries are read

• Choose endpoints of scales


Persona scales


Choose personas
• Determine list of potential personas based on common
behavioral patterns
• Sanity check
– Do they make sense? Do they reflect what we’ve seen? Are
there too many to be useful? Will they help us make design
decisions?

• Finalize initial persona list


Write personas
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Draft persona characteristics & goals for each persona
– Should come from actual user research - go back to your notes
– These attributes should be relevant to your design context

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Check persona set
– Anything missing?
– Any redundant personas?

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Write the persona descriptions
– Some bulleted lists, some narrative
– You may have multiple formats depending on your team’s needs
– A few personal details OK
• Try to relate them to your design
• Add them last

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Choose primary, secondary, etc. persona(s)

Communicate personas
• Introductory workshop
• Posting one or two page summaries in work areas
• Laminated sheet containing short summaries of all
personas
• Persona deck of cards
• Have everyone put a persona on their door to
represent who they identify with
• Set up a work area for a persona


Scenarios
• A design technique used to envision future use of a system
– Focusing on how users can achieve their goals
– Helps designers & developers understand how system
will really be used
• A story about a particular persona interacting with the
system
• May be based on a use case, or a set of use cases
• Can use them for usability testing
• Scenarios become progressively more detailed


Types of Scenarios
• Context Scenarios
– High-level, no interaction details
– Focus is on how the user can achieve her goals
– Part of Requirements Definition phase

• Key path scenarios
– Incorporate functional and data needs into the
scenarios
– Part of the UI Framework Definition phase


Persona Resources
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Books
– About Face 3.0
– The Persona Lifecycle
– Practical Personas: The User Is Always Right
Presentations
– UIE's Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less:
http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/building_personas/
– "data driven design research personas:"
http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-design-researchpersonas
– "The user is always right: Making Personas Work for Your Site:"
http://www.slideshare.net/MulderMedia/the-user-is-always-right-makingpersonas-work-for-your-site
Articles
– Building a data-backed persona:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/building-a-data
– Personas vs. User Descriptions:
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/15/personas-vs-userdescriptions-apples-vs-tomatoes/

Questions?
• Contact info:
– Allison Bloodworth, abloodworth@berkeley.edu
– Rachel Hollowgrass, rachel@media.berkeley.edu

Using Personas to Guide User-Centered Design

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