Persona Methods

Personas are generalizations over users, consumer and customers who are expressed by concrete examples. For instance, a segment of middle aged, middle class male digital camera enthusiasts could be represented by a prototypical persona called Jim. There are many reasons for doing so, presuming that it is possible, with the right methodology (i.e. utilization of rich data and systematic process), to actually create representative personas and use them efficiently in the design process. One reason is that other ways of reporting and using consumer research are often quite useless. Raw data and big reports are difficult to interpret and often designers, rather than reading through hundreds of pages, will go with a few, possibly random, so-called key insights. In other words, personas facilitate user-centred design by actually making user-insights useful.

Obviously personas help focusing the product development by limiting design choices to be guided by all possible users to a better defined target. Furthermore, they have the advantage of forcing user researchers and products developers alike to be explicit about their assumptions, while at the same time engendering interest and empathy.

Pruit and Adlin (2006) operates with a five stage persona process structured around a lifecycle metaphor. These steps include family planning, conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and lifetime achievement and retirement.

Family planning stands for the pre-project planning (preject), including basic things like determining if, why and how the use of personas will benefit the organisation, assembly of a core team that will be involved in the persona creation process and preliminary identification of the data sources that will provide raw material for the personas.

Conception and gestation stands for the actual creation of the personas based on various data sources and general guidelines for which elements to include in the persona construction and how to communicate the personas. Descriptive elements range from basic things like age, gender, ethnicity to more seemingly extraneous information like email activities, choice of car, favourite books etc.

Birth and maturation refers to the introduction and dissemination of the personas to the relevant parties, for instance designers and product developers.

Adulthood stands for actual use of personas. Basically this means using the personas for actual innovative work like product or service design and development. A normal typical ways of using personas is asking questions like: “Would Jim want to use this feature?”

Lifetime achievement and retirement is a post process evaluation where it is decided whether personas can be used in other projects or whether they should simply be discarded.