Approaches to Creating Personas  

You do research to better understand your users, but exactly what is it that you want to find out about them? That's the first question you need to ask, and its answer dictates which research methods you should use, since specific methods are tailored to finding specific types of information.

Mulder, Steve. InformationDesign (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas

If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success

As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by “doing the math,” which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding.

Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

The Next Frontier for User-Centered Design: Making User Representations More Usable  

Personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary people constructed out of well-understood, highly specified data about real people. We believe that when you use data to create personas, and use personas in a thoughtful way during the product development process, you will: increase your product's usability, utility, and general appeal; streamline your team's processes and improve your colleagues' abilities to work together; enable your company to make business decisions that help both your company and your customers; improve your company's bottom line.

Pruitt, John and Tamara Adlin. Elsevier (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit  

This toolkit enables you to build up detailed profiles of the personas themselves, their relationship to the product, and the context in which they use the product. The intended user of the toolkit is the product's designer, so it's it advisable to streamline the personas to critical aspects when presenting them outside the product development team. Even within the development team, not everyone may need every single detail about the persona.

Olsen, George. IAsummit (2004). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Personas: Focusing on Getting the Design Right

The individual components of a persona are described and an example persona relating to the SecureCam case study is provided.

Meighan, Fiona. Apogee (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Personas: Practice and Theory  

' Personas' is an interaction design technique with considerable potential for software product development. In three years of use, our colleagues and we have extended Alan Cooperís technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. After describing and illustrating our approach, we outline the psychological theory that explains why Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios. As Cooper and others have observed, Personas can engage team members very effectively. They also provide a conduit for conveying a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data, and focus attention on aspects of design and use that other methods do not.

Pruitt, John and Jonathan Grudin. Microsoft (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

User Persona: Its Application and the Art of Stereotyping

I feel that creation of user persona is nothing but realistic stereotyping or a simplified outline of the user. The word 'realistic' is more important as realism can be achieved only through user study. (I am not referring to the fictional personas applicable in futuristic technologies). Humorists, cartoonists and filmmakers are gifted with the art of stereotyping. But they tend to exaggerate a lot. Therefore the personalities they render appear like caricatures. We must avoid caricatured user personas. While stereotyping, you generalize and oversimplify. And when you do that you pick or eliminate some details. That makes all the difference.

Katre, Dinesh S. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Users, Roles, and Personas  

User role models are compared in detail with the popular user modeling technique of personas. User roles offer a more compact, more focused means of capturing and exploring those aspects of users most relevant to interaction design. The advantages and limitations of the approaches are considered and a combined strategy is described.

Constantine, Larry L. Constantine and Lockwood (2006). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Using Persona Advocates to Develop User-Centric Intranets and Portals

One powerful design tool, personas, can help provide a framework for building Intranets that will satisfy a variety of needs. Effectively developed and used, personas enable Intranet teams to hone in on user needs and build interfaces and user experiences that end-user audiences can and will use.

McQueen, Howard. McQueen Consulting (2008). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Real or Imaginary: The Effectiveness of Using Personas in Product Design  

The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.

Long, Frank. Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Caution: Stereotypes Under Construction

Now that I have your attention, I’ll tell you up front that what Janea follows is not a rant. It’s not even a statement for or against Triplett political correctness. It’s a caution–words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype.

Triplett, Janea. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Ten Steps to Personas

Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.

Nielsen, Lene. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

What’s My Persona? Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character

I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

How to Understand Your Users with Personas

Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.

Colbow, Brad. Carsonified (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points.

Goodwin, Kim. Cooper Journal (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas

What's Your Customer's Persona?

Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture."

Abrams, Rhonda. USA Today (2005). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Personas