Jen McGinn gives a presentation on persona development. She defines personas as hypothetical archetypes that represent important user groups. Personas are defined by their goals and come in the form of 1-2 page descriptions with names and personal details. McGinn discusses different uses of personas and provides advice based on her experience. She also presents two case studies where personas were developed for an existing training product and a new product to validate initial personas and gather additional user insights.

1. PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO
KNOW, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
Jen McGinn
Principal User Experience Engineer, Oracle
6/9/2012

2. Introduction
 Jen McGinn
 BS Information Systems, MS Human Factors in Information
Design
 UX career: Sun, SolidWorks, Nokia, Oracle
 UI Design & User research
 Survey design and analysis
 Persona development
 Heuristic evaluation
 Reviewer for CHI, UPA conference committee, reviewer for
JUS, Boston UPA Board of Directors
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

3. Agenda
 Definitions
 Advice based on lessons learned from my experience
 Persona development case studies
 Ask questions!
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

4. What are personas?
Personas are a product design tool:
 First “invented” by Alan Cooper, in 1999
 A name for pretend users who represent populations
(hypothetical archetypes)
 Defined by their goals (goal-driven design), which are
motivations for behaviors
 1- to 2-page descriptions
 Names and personal details
 Originally used to drive interface design
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

5. 6/9/2012Jen McGinn

6. Use Cases for Personas
 Formative or summative?
 Yes :)
 Where are you in the design lifecycle?
 Determines how the personas can be used
 Validating a value proposition
 Mocking up prototypes
 Creating use cases for the technology
 Recruiting for usability testing
 How much do you already know about your users?
 How well can you communicate that knowledge across organizations
and up and down the management chain?
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

7. Traditional persona development process
 Cooper (1999)
 “it is more important that a persona be precise than accurate”
 Pruitt & Adlin (2006)
 Identify important categories of users
 Process the [existing] data
 Identify & create skeletons
 Prioritize the skeletons
 Develop selected skeletons into personas
 Validate your personas
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

8. More approaches
 Goodwin ( Multiple papers)
 First to call for validation of personas
 Mulder (2007)
 Uses lots of quantitative data as well as qualitative data
 Cooper, Reimann, Cronin (2007)
 “Personas are based on research”
 McGinn & Kotamraju (CHI 2008)
 Large-scale survey first, followed by targeted interviews
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

9. Getting started
 Don't work in a vacuum
 Get all the stakeholders involved
 What are the big questions that the business needs to answer?
 Use your subject matter experts
 Not as a direct data source
 People who can provide background
 Give a 20- to 30-minute talk to the team to define
expectations
 What data will and won’t be gathered?
 Ask about time and budget constraints
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

10. How to get buy-in
 Position the personas as a way to validate what they already
know or challenge the conventional wisdom
 Define terms and UCD concepts
 Compare & contrast what you do to 'x'
 Use what you know about the client organization
 What do they value?
 What is their language?
 What is their history?
 What are they being goaled on?
 Align your data gathering with their business needs
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

11. Persona attributes
 Generic
 Education, work experience, age, computer proficiency, income,
geography, relationship status, number of children, pets, etc.
 Specific
 Germane to the problems that your organization is to trying to
solve
 Collaboration in distributed meetings
 Project and portfolio management
 Training and certification
 Cell phone and laptop users
 Caregivers and patients
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

12. Persona attributes
 What attributes should you include?
 (Signal)Attributes that are germane to the problems that your
organization is to trying to solve
 Are you working for Petco?
 For Peapod?
 For Bank of America?
 For Dell?
 What attributes should you omit?
 Everything else
 (Noise) Any attribute that is not germane to the problems that
your organization is trying to solve
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

13. Kinds of questions
 Demographic: Age, job role, education
 May be important for user segmentation
 Help to determine the value of the user group
 And subsequently, to determine their high-value tasks
 User Research: Behavior, reporting prior experience
 What motivates you to take training?
 Who approves your training?
 How much have you spent on training in the last year?
 Marketing: Opinions, preferences, future-focused
 How much will you spend on training this year?
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

14. How many personas?
 How do you know when you have enough?
 When you’re not learning anything new
 Not enough?
 Test: Can you say one way or the other that the persona would
appreciate a given feature and why?
 Example: Developer, System Administrator, Manager
 Too many?
 Test: Are there attributes that are repeated across personas? Can you
take what’s left and move it into another persona?
 Example: College student, 23- to 28-year-old professional, 29- to 35-
year-old professional
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

15. Photos
 Will they be used for internal only purposes?
 Where to find or get photos
 Istockphoto.com or another royalty-free site
 Internal database of employees, Facebook
 Take them yourself
 Hire them out to an agency
 Alternatives to photos
 Comics/drawings
 Action figures? (Cisco)
 What would work best in your organization?
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

16. Names
 Alliteration
 Sally the sales sleuth, Jared the Java Developer
 When in the process to give your personas names
 Too early: focus on wrong attribute
 Too late: no-one can remember the name
 What attribute do you feature?
 What are you measuring?
 How is this persona differentiated from the others?
 Specific behavior (sales sleuth, list maker)
 Demographic attribute (college student, retiree)
 Job tasks or roles (middleware administrator, doctor)
 Attitude or value (social connector v. seeks entertainment)
 Goals (attend a meeting v. host a meeting)
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

17. Cisco, 2007
6/9/2012Jen McGinn
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1240905

18. Validation
 Is it necessary?
 Confidence & credibility
 What are the various methods?
 Use a different kind and type of method than what you used to initially
develop the personas
 Build it into the persona development process
 Make sure you have data from one quantitative method and one
qualitative
 Examples:
 Survey + phone interviews
 Brainstorming, focus groups, and surveys
 Ethnography (on-site interviews) and survey
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

19. Reporting
 Power Point
 As many diagrams as possible
 20 to 90 minutes
 What do you cover?
 Goals
 Development process
 Implementation details
 Findings
 Next steps
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

20. How long will it take?
 It depends :)
 How long do you have?
 What other constraints are on the problem?
 What is the scale of the research? Are these personas for one
product, or the whole company?
 How many and which methods will you use?
 At least 2: One quantitative + one qualitative
 Which activities need to be performed serially vs. what can be
performed in parallel?
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

21. How much will it cost?
 Time – yours and your
colleagues'
 Planning
 Recruiting
 Conducting research
 Analyzing data
 Developing personas
 Reporting out
 “Materials”
 Incentives
 Lab
 Survey vendor
 Translation
 Food & drinks
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

22. UIE’s Attributes of Successful Personas
6/9/2012Jen McGinn
 Five Factors for Successful Persona Projects
 http://www.uie.com/articles/successful_persona_projects/
1. Conduct First-hand Research
2. Include The Broader Team
3. Develop an Intimate Knowledge of Each Persona
4. Be Relevant to the Immediate Design Objectives
5. Provide Rich Scenarios for Each Persona

23. Existing Product Case Study
Issue:
Training organization needed to know more about who was taking
training and getting professional certification; all of their data was
anecdotal
Research Goal:
Develop personas for the organization to provide a framework for
understanding and organizing conflicting marketing data; use this
new understanding to drive revenue growth in the coming fiscal
year
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

24. Method
1. Worked with the client team to determine important persona
attributes
2. Created a survey to gather data that the organization needed
on their customers
3. Invited customers to take the survey (1328 completes)
4. Used statistical factor analysis to create initial persona
groupings
5. Followed up with (~30) targeted interviews
6. Adjusted the groups as necessary
7. Personas distilled the survey data & interviews into meaningful
chunks
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

25. Geographies Represented
Persona Family 1 Persona Family 2 Persona Family 3 Persona Family 4Harry
Larry
Sam
Dan
Mike
Alex
Joanna
Jared
Terry
Carly
Manny
Americas 41% 49% 50% 38% 47% 59% 41% 43% 38% 43% 52%
APAC 28% 19% 19% 35% 22% 22% 37% 31% 25% 29% 20%
EMEA 31% 32% 32% 27% 31% 19% 23% 26% 37% 28% 28%
100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

26. Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

27. New Product Case Study
Issue:
New product development team was designing for users that the
company had never tried to sell to before. Initial personas had
been brainstormed.
Research Goals:
Validate the personas
Get feedback on the value proposition from representatives of
the persona groups
Get more data on what they used their cell phones and laptops
for
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

28. Method
 Personas
 Brainstormed 7 distinct personas with the dev team
 Got management to narrow the research focus to 3
 Recruited 8 – 10 participants for each of 3 focus groups
 Each participant completed a lengthy survey detailing their
cell phone and laptop habits
 Desired outcomes:
 Persona validation/new information
 Feedback on value proposition & physical designs
 Determine which service to develop first
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

29. Technological proficiency
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

30. Pre-session Questionnaire
2. Other than making and receiving calls, what do you use your cell phone for? Select all that apply.
___ Nothing else ___ Viewing email attachments
___ Web access ___ Editing documents
___ Listening to music ___ Personal Organizer / Calendar
___ Taking pictures ___ Check on my auctions
___ Viewing or editing photos ___ Alarm clock
___ Text messaging ___ Calculator
___ Video messaging ___ GPS / Mapping
___ Address book ___ Games
___ Taking notes ___ Shopping lists
___ Online Banking ___ Watching videos or TV shows
___ Email ___ Other ___________________
___ Social networking (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on)
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

31. Pre-session Questionnaire
16. What do you most frequently use your computer for? Select up to ten answers.
___ Work or school work (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations)
___ To-do lists
___ Email and correspondence
___ Listening to the radio
___ Watching TV
___ Watching videos on the web
___ Watching DVDs or downloaded movies
___ Archiving or listening to my music collection
___ Social networking (MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on)
___ Researching products, services, or companies
___ Shopping (purchasing, not researching)
___ Selling on eBay, Amazon, Craig’s list, or other site
___ Instant messaging
…... Too many more to list to be legible on the slide …
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

32. Example of resulting findings
Top uses for cell phone other than
making/receiving calls
•Text messaging (19 of 20)
•Alarm clock (17 of 20)
•Calculator (14 of 20)
•Address book (12 of 20)
•Taking pictures (12 of 20)
•Personal organizer (10 of 20)
Most-frequently used applications on their
computers:
•Email & correspondence (20)
•Office productivity tools (18)
•Mapping/directions (18)
•Online banking (16)
•Reading news sites, feeds, or blogs (14)
•Watching videos on the web (13)
•Researching products & services (13)
•Shopping (purchasing) (13)
These were discrete sets
(in early 2007)
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

33. Take-aways
6/9/2012Jen McGinn
 Personas can be as effective or ineffective as any other
research method
 Personas should be aligned closely with the business goals of
your stakeholders
 Conduct original research to develop them
 Use multiple types of methods
 Find out what resonates with your stakeholders (branding or Barbies?)
 Have fun 

34. Questions?
???
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

35. References
 Books
 The Inmates are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper (1999)
 About Face 3, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David
Cronin (2007)
 The Persona Lifecycle, by John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin (2006).
 The User is Always Right, Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar
 Papers
 Kim Goodwin's Articles on Cooper.com
http://www.cooper.com/insights/journal_of_design/articles/
Jen McGinn 6/9/2012

36. PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO
KNOW, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
Jen McGinn
Principal User Experience Engineer, Oracle
6/9/2012