1. PERSONA
DEVELOPMENT
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW,
BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
Jen McGinn
5/26/2011 Principal User Experience Engineer, Oracle
2. 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
3. Agenda
Definitions
Advice based on lessons learned from my
experience
Persona development case studies
Ask questions!
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
4. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
6. 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?
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
7. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
8. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
9. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
10. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
11. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
12. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
13. 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?
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
14. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
15. 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?
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
16. 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)
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
17. Cisco, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1240905
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
18. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
19. Reporting
PowerPoint
As many diagrams as possible
20 to 90 minutes
What do you cover?
Goals
Development process
Implementation details
Findings
Next steps
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
20. 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?
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
21. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
22. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
23. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
24. 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%
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
26. 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.
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
27. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
29. 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)
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
30. 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 …
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
31. 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
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
33. 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/
Jen McGinn 5/26/2011
34. PERSONA
DEVELOPMENT
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW,
BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
Jen McGinn
5/26/2011 Principal User Experience Engineer, Oracle