Abstract:
The “persona” is a powerful tool for understanding
users and guiding design. Learn research methods, techniques
for analyzing data and writing personas, and tips for
putting them to use. A hands-on tutorial in which you
practice key steps, building the skills to craft and apply
personas in your own work.
Learning objectives:
Personas have captured the interest of usability practitioners
as a powerful aid to user-centered design. This tutorial
teaches a framework for how to develop personas and
gives participants the basic skills for creating and
using personas in their own work. Participants will
learn about and gain hands-on practice with:
- Positioning personas with respect to market research
- Performing contextual research through interview
and observation
Analyzing data and identifying patterns
- Crafting personas
- Using personas in your work
How tutorial will be conducted:
The day combines lectures about theory and process with
hands-on exercises and discussion. Participants will work
in small teams to gain practice in interviewing, analysis,
and writing personas. We will introduce a “project”
to focus and tie together the exercises performed throughout
the day. Some of the project work will require participants
to perform contextual research in the conference hotel.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF MATERIAL
Introduction
The instructors introduce themselves and review the
tutorial’s goals, learning objectives, and agenda.
We solicit up-front issues, questions, and “things
I really want to learn” from the participants
and record them on a flipchart to ensure they are addressed
in the tutorial.
Understanding Personas
The instructors present several example personas from
their work and use them to illustrate basic concepts
such as:
- “Ingredients” of personas
- Principles of personas
- Types of personas
When promoting personas in your organization, it’s
important to understand how they relate to other tools
for formulating and communicating customer insight.
This section includes a discussion on how to position
personas with respect to usage classes and models of
market segmentation.
Performing User Field Research
A brief overview of issues and activities required
in planning user field research:
- Interview the project’s internal stakeholders.
This elicits people’s ideas and assumptions
about the user, giving you something concrete against
which to compare your findings.
- Recruit users. Obtain a market segmentation model,
if it exists, and review your assumptions to build
a matrix of people you need to visit. Includes tips
for determining how many visits may be required.
- Create a “Site Visit Guide” that outlines
your research objectives and describes your plan.
Information on planning this type of research is available
from numerous sources, so participants will receive
handouts that include further resources and recommendations.
They will also receive sample documents to aid them
when planning their own research.
The instructors then present guidelines for actually
performing user field research. These tips prepare participants
for two interviews they will conduct before the lunch
break. Tips to include, for example:
- Interview teams should have a maximum of 3 people,
one person clearly leading.
- Have a conversation, don’t perform an interrogation.
Think of yourself as an apprentice, the user as the
master.
- Just because you know the answer to a question doesn’t
mean you should not ask it!
- “Replay” what you hear to check your
understanding.
- Look for clues in the physical and social environments.
Again, we will provide handouts that summarize the key
information for participants to aid them at a later date.
Feedback we have received when teaching this tutorial
in the past indicates it is most important to give participants
a chance for hands-on practice, so a quick orientation
is sufficient.
Exercise: Interview and Observation
The instructors introduce the “project”
that will inspire the tutorial’s exercises for
the day, then form the participants into 3-person teams.
In this first exercise, participants will interview each
other about activities relating to the assigned project,
observing actual behaviors when possible. Participants
may leave the tutorial room and explore the conference
hotel to perform this exercise in a real-life context.
Two rounds of interview/observation will occur. In each
team, one person volunteers to be interviewed, one person
to lead the interview, and one person to record and observe.
Participants will play different roles in each round.
When each interview is complete, the group records
its top insights on a flipchart and posts them on the
wall. This will generate a fairly large collection of
insights, allowing people to learn from interviews performed
by other teams.
In later exercises, these insights will be analyzed
and developed into personas.
The instructors will provide a handout with suggested
topics to discuss, questions to ask, and behaviors to
observe for the assigned project. This lets the teams
focus on actually conducting the interview and observation
instead of planning the research for a “fake”
project.
Analyzing Data
The instructors describe the first few steps in a process
for crafting personas, specifically the steps for making
sense of data collected from customer interviews.
To preview:
- Review all your interviews and create a master list
of relevant facts and observations.
- Select the insights you feel are defining characteristics;
think of this list as the “DNA” that defines
your personas.
- Cluster the DNA into groups that reflect what you
observed in your research. We call these early groups
the “skeletons” of your personas.
For each step in this process, the instructors will
show examples from client work.
Exercise: From DNA to Skeleton
In this exercise, participants work in teams to first
create a “DNA list” from the insights posted
around the room. They then cluster the insights as described
above, resulting in groups of persona “skeletons”.
The instructors will move between teams, assisting them
as appropriate.
Crafting Personas
The instructors describe the remaining steps in the
process for crafting personas. To preview:
- Write a draft narrative for each persona skeleton.
We are better able to judge the believability of a
story than of a loose collection of insights.
- Assess the believability of each narrative. Could
the people being described move comfortably among
the users who you interviewed? If not, revise accordingly.
The final group of narratives forms the basis for
your collection of personas.
- Fill out the details of each persona, as appropriate.
The resulting framework should capture all the information
to be conveyed in the persona. We call this the persona’s
“body”.
- Assign types. For example, determine which are primary,
secondary, and anti-personas.
- Complete the final persona. Craft the narrative,
list the facts, select photographs, identify key quotations,
and add other details needed to make the persona come
to life. We call this the persona’s “personality”.
Again, the instructors will illustrate these steps with
examples from client work.
Exercise: From Skeleton to Persona
In this exercise, participants continue to work in the
same teams. They select a promising “skeleton”
from the previous exercise and write a draft narrative.
Once they are satisfied with the narrative, they add details
from the insights posted around the room or from their
own interview experiences, building its “body”.
The instructors will move between teams, assisting them
as appropriate.
As time permits, the teams may build the “personality”
of their persona before laying it out on a flipchart.
Participants then have an opportunity to view the personas
created by other teams.
This exercise concludes with a group discussion about
the process and the resulting personas.
Putting Your Personas to Work
The instructors share suggestions for how to unveil personas
to the world and put them to work in a project. Suggestions
include:
- Provide personal copies to everyone on the team
and print large posters for display.
- Get to know them as people; refer to them by name.
- Have them “attend” every project meeting
to facilitate communication.
- Use them to inspire and guide design decisions;
inform documentation and marketing strategies; establish
development priorities.
Wrap-up Discussion
This time is reserved for a general discussion of the
day, prompted by participant questions and comments. The
instructors ensure that everything has been addressed
that appeared on the morning’s list of “things
I really want to learn”.
Instructor’s Biographies
Robert Barlow-Busch has been designing
software and web applications and advocating usability
engineering for about 12 years. This work has taken
him throughout North America and Europe and includes
familiar names such as Sony and FedEx. Today, Robert
is a senior advisor in Interaction Design at Quarry
Integrated Communications. In this role, Robert leads
projects in which personas figure prominently, guiding
the design and influencing the marketing of products
in industries from communications to biotechnology.
Robert has lectured at several universities and presented
at conferences for UPA, IHM-HCI, and IBM.
Tammy teWinkel is VP of Interaction
Design at Quarry. With more than 12 years of industry
experience, she helps Quarry’s clients build usable
software that integrates their brand across websites,
applications, and other digital channels. Her team provides
industry-leading user-centered design practices to deliver
customer insight, usability, and interaction design
through a process of collaborative teamwork. Prior to
joining Quarry, Tammy was a partner in Convivia Interaction
Design. Her industry experience includes work with FedEx,
HP, Nortel Networks, IBM, TD Canada Trust, Bank of Montreal,
and the Ontario Science Centre.
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