Personas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.