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Personas: Why You Should Use Them
Rick Henkin
Imagine a prospect calling and talking to your sales representative. This person is specifically interested in knowing how quickly you can customize and implement a solution for them. Now, imagine your sales representative ignoring their concerns and speaking only about the technical aspects of the product. Think you would lose a lot of sales? Think this prospect would be frustrated and go elsewhere? Unless you design your website with different types of customers in mind, it's all just a one way conversation that's grabbing the attention of only a small portion of those who actually click onto your site.What is a persona?A persona is a fictitious person representing a type of customer or customer group that might use your product or service. Most likely, your website will attract several different personas. Usually they are given identities with names and detailed descriptions including backgrounds, interests and needs. The term was first described by Alan Cooper in his book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity 
The purpose of creating personas is to put a human face on the abstract data you have on your customers. Hopefully, by humanizing this information, you and your designer will have more empathy and understanding toward the goals, needs, questions and behavior of those who use your product or service and will design your website and products accordingly. How can personas benefit me?By using a persona as a reference point, it forces you to look at your site and products from your customer's perspective, which is the only point of view that really matters. You begin to think like the persona and ask questions that he/she might ask- "How would Bob use this?" or " Would Jane feel this was a helpful feature?" According to the Usability.gov website (the primary government source for information on usability and user-centered design) there are many benefits to using personas:
How do you create personas?Personas are based on knowledge of real users. They are created from data on hand as well as from interviews, surveys and focus groups. If your company is large enough that you have a marketing department or customer service department, these can be excellent sources of information about your users. Demographic data from server logs can be useful as well. You want to accumulate enough data so that you can begin to recognize patterns of behavior. These patterns can then be divided into primary and secondary user groups that are distinctly different from each other. Once you have these groups defined, it's time to begin creating the actual personas. Each one should have:
Now, take all of the above and write a 500-700 word story or scenario about each persona. This helps to make them even more "real." The more you put into each persona, the more you'll get out of it. What do I do with all of these personas?Since you can't design your website to satisfy all of the personas, you have to identify those that are primary and those that are secondary. According to Alan Cooper in his book About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design 
:"Separating personas into primary and secondary categories allows us to focus our design on the people whose needs matter most. As we design for a primary persona we check the design against secondary personas to make sure that they are not neglected. Primary personas are critical archetypal users. Their goals must be satisfied, or they and others will be frustrated. Each primary persona requires a unique interface in order to meet his or her goals. Secondary personas are people who influence the design of the interface, but are not a focus of the design. Secondary personas include beginner-level users, infrequent users and experts. An interface that satisfies only the needs of secondary personas will frustrate and confuse primary personas. The unique needs of the secondary persona, however, must be met in order to make viable products for a large number of users in the real world." While different individuals might have different tasks, as long as their goals are the same, they can be represented by the same persona. ConclusionThere are arguments against using personas-most notably that they are "artificial" persons and don't really have any validity. I believe that anything that puts you more into the mindset of your customer is beneficial. Remember, it's not what you think or your designer thinks. It's only important what your customer thinks. By thinking like your customer, you'll make better choices regarding the design of your site, how it works and how people find it. ARTICLE DATE: 2009-05-26 REVISED DATE: Share this Article as a Tweet on Twitter
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