Persona Development

PERSONA
DEVELOPMENT
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW,
BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
Jen McGinn
5/26/2011 Principal User Experience Engineer, Oracle

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 CHI Board of Directors
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011

Agenda
 Definitions
 Advice based on lessons learned from my
experience
 Persona development case studies

 Ask questions!


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

Use cases
 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?

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


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


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


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


Persona attributes
 Generic
 Education, work experience, age, computer
proficiency, geography, relationship status, income,
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


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 Countrywide?
 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


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?


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


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?


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)


Cisco, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1240905


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


Reporting
 PowerPoint
 As many diagrams as possible
 20 to 90 minutes
 What do you cover?
 Goals

 Development process
 Implementation details

 Findings

 Next steps


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?


How much will it cost?

 Time – yours and  “Materials”
your colleagues'
 Planning  Incentives
 Recruiting  Lab
 Conducting research  Survey vendor
 Analyzing data  Translation
 Developing personas  Food & drinks
 Reporting out


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

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

Geographies Represented
Persona Family 1 Persona Family 2 Persona Family 3 Persona Family 4

Joanna

Manny
Jared
Harry

Larry

Terry

Carly
Mike
Sam

Alex
Dan
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%


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.

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


Technological proficiency


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)


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 …

Take-aways
 Personas can be as effective or ineffective as
any other research method you learn here
 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 

Questions?

???


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/


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