Dictionary Definition
persona
Noun
1 an actor's portrayal of someone in a play; "she
played the part of Desdemona" [syn: character, role, theatrical
role, part]
2 (Jungian psychology) a personal facade that one
presents to the world; "a public image is as fragile as Humpty
Dumpty" [syn: image]
[also: personae
(pl)]personae See persona
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Noun
personae- Plural of persona
Extensive Definition
Personas are fictitious characters that are
created to represent the different user types within a targeted
demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are most
often used as part of a user-centered
design process for designing software or online applications,
in which the goals, desires, and limitations of the user are
considered when designing the product. They are also considered a
part of interaction
design (IxD). Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions
about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual
design.
A user persona is a representation of the goals
and behavior of real user group. In most cases, personas are
synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They
are captured in 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior
patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few
fictional personal details to bring the persona to life. For each
product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona
should always be the primary focus for the design.
The concept and methodology of personas was
separately developed by Angus Jenkinson and Alan Cooper from around
1995 from different trajectories before being picked up by the web
community as a perfect tool.
Jenkinson, who had previously initiated the
“touchpoints” or
“moment of truth” concept in CRM design in 1988 and subsequently
“event triggers” as tools for designing automated rule-based CRM
response mechanisms, worked with the Ogilvy
group between 1994 and 1999. The seed of the personas idea was
described in his 1994 paper Beyond Segmentation. The goal was to go
beyond traditional segmentation to understand the essential or
archetypal characteristics of a customer community. Between 1996
and 2001, with the collaboration of Michael Jacobs, a series of
papers describing the methods and giving examples were posted to
OgilvyOne’s online knowledge base Truffles and used in 40 countries
under the proprietary name ‘CustomerPrints’ to enhance service and
customer loyalty in one-to-one brand marketing. International
courses teaching scores of participants from some 25 countries were
run with the OgilvyOne worldwide group and used in a substantial
number of major brand interventions, including by OgilvyOne’s
digital group, OgilvyOne Interactive.
Jenkinson's approach was to describe an imaginal
character in their real interface, behaviour and attitudes with the
brand, and the idea was initially realized with Michael Jacobs in a
series of examples, including Harley owners and UK supermarket
shoppers.
Parallel to this Alan Cooper, a noted pioneer
software developer, developed a related concept. From 1995 he
became engaged with how a specific rather than generalized users
would use and interface with software. The technique was
popularized in his 1999 book 'The Inmates are Running the Asylum'.
In this book, Cooper outlines the general characteristics, uses and
best practices for creating personas, recommending that software be
designed for single archetypal users.
A similar approach was applied in 1998 by
Jenkinson in designing the CRM systems for the Vodafone group. The
objective was to make it easier for marketing management to sign
off the specification of the system. It involved imagining and
describing how a single marketing manager would interface with the
system during a typical day.
Online brands blending needs for management of
branding, interaction with communities of interest and user
interface design readily accepted these ideas. Brand planners apply
a similar concept known as pen portraits.
Advantages of personas
According to Pruitt and Adlin, 2006, the use of personas offers several benefits in product development (cf. Grudin and Pruitt, 2002; Cooper, 1999). Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and feature definition. Pruitt and Adlin argue that personas are easy to communicate to engineering teams and thus allow engineers, developers, and others to absorb customer data in a palatable format. They present several examples of personas used for purposes of communication in various development projects (Pruitt and Adlin, 2006).Personas also help prevent some common design
pitfalls which may otherwise be easy to fall into. The first is
designing for what Cooper calls 'The Elastic User' - by which he
means that while making product decisions different stakeholders
may define the 'user' according to their convenience. Defining
personas helps the team have a shared understanding of the real
users in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts. Personas
also help prevent "self referential design" when the designer or
developer may unconsciously project their own mental models on the
product design which may be very different from that of the target
user population. Personas also provide a reality check by helping
designers keep the focus of the design on cases that are most
likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases
which usually won't happen for the target population. According to
Cooper, edge cases which should naturally be handled properly
should not become the design focus (Cooper, 1999).
Benefits
- Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
- Team members’ solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
- Provide a human "face" so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
(Cooper, 1999)
Personas based upon ethnographic research
Some designers feel that personas should be based
on ethnographic research into users and should not be
manufactured/fabricated. The use of ethnographic research helps the
creation of a number of archetype users that can be used to develop
products that deliver positive user experiences. By feeding in real
data, ethnographic research allows design teams to avoid generating
stereotypical users that may bear no relation to the actual user’s
reality.
Criticism of personas
Criticism of personas falls into three general
categories: analysis of the underlying logic, concerns about
practical implementation, and empirical results (cf. Chapman and
Milham, 2006; Rönkkö, 2005). In terms of logic, personas have been
argued to have no clear relationship to real customer data.
Personas are fictional and therefore there is no clear way to
determine how many users are represented by any given persona. For
this reason, critics have claimed that personas have no definite
relationship to real customer data and therefore cannot be
scientific. Chapman & Milham (2006) described the purported
flaws in considering personas as a scientific research
method.
In practice, the utility of personas on teams
varies from team to team. Some development groups may adopt them
readily while others may express considerable skepticism. In
empirical results, the research to date has offered soft metrics
for the success of personas, such as anecdotal feedback from
stakeholders. Rönkkö (2005) has described how team politics and
other organizational issues led to limitations of the personas
method in one set of projects.
References:
- Carroll, John M. Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions. MIT Press, 2000. ISBN 0-262-03279-1
- Carroll, J.M. ed. Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. Wiley, 1995. ISBN 0-471-07659-7
- Chapman, C.N. & Milham, R. The personas' new clothes. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) 2006, San Francisco, CA. October 2006. http://cnchapman.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/chapman-milham-personas-hfes2006-0139-0330.pdf
- Cooper, Alan. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. SAMS, 1999. ISBN 0-672-31649-8
- Grudin, J. and Pruitt, J. Personas, participatory design and product development: an infrastructure for engagement. Paper presented at Participatory Design Conference 2002, Malmo, Sweden. June 2002.
- Jenkinson, A. (1994), Beyond Segmentation, Journal of Targeting, Marketing and Analysis for Measurement, Vol. 3 (No.1), p60-72
- Pruitt, John & Adlin, Tamara. The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2006. ISBN 0-12-566251-3
- Rönkkö, K. An empirical study demonstrating how different design constraints, project organization, and contexts limited the utility of personas. Hawaii
- Nielsen, L. Engaging Personas and Narrative Scenarios. Samfundslitteratur, PhD-Series. 2004. http://personas.dk/?p=26
External links
personae in German: Personas
personae in Korean: 페르소나
personae in Dutch: Persona