UX - Personas
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- monkeyshine0
I do quite a bit of persona work in my role. Research based personas are the most solid because they are obviously based on real data but also become a guide for the rest of the team to use (including dev) as a product or site gets designed and built.
Fictive personas are good when you have budget or access to real research and are creating personas based upon assumptions. Those assumptions should be tested though through user testing as the product/site is being designed.
Here are a couple of great examples of personas that are more task/use case oriented (and I think great for fictive):
Speech bubble persona: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/243…
Persona Ecosystem:
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/243…
- jtb260
They can be useful. They are not something you just invent though, it takes a fair amount of research to come up with them.
Here is a good primer on the subject: http://uxmag.com/articles/person…
- monospaced0
- In my experience, contact with one of these personas is usually a negative one.monospaced
- clearly I'm not up on the new term, so apologies that this isn't on-topic exactlymonospaced
- vaxorcist0
Long time ago, but we used persona's in part to keep things on track and control scope creep / "interactive filmmaker" tendencies amongst certain stakeholders...
i.e. "Hurried Henry just wants to find where to get his order status asap and can't stand all this promotional popup stuff"
- Frosty_spl0
My old agency worked with a company to create 6 of them for a huge site project. This is a specialty in of itself.
But you can probably find a book on the subject.
- omg0
I use personas to create better product experience. I think it can be a rather useful exercise to draw out all the elements that can improve and refine a product in its design, development and ability to service its delivery and communication to the audience.
- cannonball19780
There are two ways you can go about doing this:
1) Research-backed personas. Find out who is using the site currently, who isn't using the site, and who you want to use the site. Use the personals to evidence design changes. These take time and money to make them fact-based through different methods.
2) Fictive story-oriented personas. These are usually used to demonstrate a product or service in a particular scenario as a way of orienting the perspective to the user instead of some feature list. this takes only a bit of imagination to make.
I've made a few of these myself. For each persona it's good to list things that help the designer understand what is in the persona's headspace, like motivations, desires, backgrounds, etc. Sometimes they come with a statement that reflects their attitude or wishes. "I hate these stupid HTML scrolling effects." The more detailed they are without being cumbersome the better. Keep the personas as diverse as possible without making them unrealistic. Use photos.
Alan Cooper is the guy who pioneered persona using as a process, if you want some background.
- always done numero uno. and ignored a lot of their insights.doesnotexist