The Essential Persona Lifecycle doc

The Essential Persona Lifecycle

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The Essential

Persona Lifecycle

Your Guide to Building and

Using Personas

Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt

AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON

NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO

SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is an imprint of Elsevier

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Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

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broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical

treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating

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1011 12 13 14 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the hundreds of brave souls who have participated in our

workshops and worked with us as clients or colleagues over the past 10 years. Your creativity

and experiences helped us build this process, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and we both adore our families and friends. Your support

(and patience) mean the world to us.

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vii

CONTENTS

About the Authors.......................................................................................................ix

CHAPTER 1 What are personas? ................................................................................1

Introduction ............................................................................................1

Why a persona lifecycle? .........................................................................1

Why another persona lifecycle book? ........................................................4

What additional materials will I fi nd in the original persona lifecycle book? .... 4

CHAPTER 2 The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle..................................................7

Introduction ............................................................................................7

The persona lifecycle encourages and supports user-centered design .........8

CHAPTER 3 Persona family planning........................................................................11

What is family planning for personas? ....................................................11

Organizational introspection: Are personas right for your project? .............11

Step 1. Build a core team ......................................................................12

Step 2. Identify goals ............................................................................12

Step 3. Create an action plan ................................................................14

Step 4. Get your hands on some data ....................................................14

Get ready for conception and gestation! ..................................................17

CHAPTER 4 Persona conception and gestation........................................................19

What is the conception and gestation process for personas? ...................20

The six-step conception and gestation process .......................................21

How long does the conception and gestation process take? .....................23

How many personas should you create? .................................................23

Persona conception: Steps 1, 2, and 3 ...................................................25

Persona gestation: Steps 4, 5, and 6 .....................................................51

How to know you are ready for birth and maturation ................................79

Summary .............................................................................................80

CHAPTER 5 Persona birth and maturation................................................................81

What is birth and maturation for personas? ............................................82

Step 1. Prepare for birth and beyond ......................................................82

Step 2. Birth ........................................................................................88

Step 3. Maturation ................................................................................93

Persona artifacts (the what and how of communicating your

personas) .............................................................................................95

If you are a consultant .........................................................................112

Summary ...........................................................................................113

CHAPTER 6 Persona adulthood..............................................................................115

What is adulthood for personas? ..........................................................116

What to expect during persona adulthood .............................................116

Job 1: Help your personas settle in ......................................................117

Start with the basics: Invite personas into your offi ces and into your

meetings ............................................................................................118

Plan, design, evaluate, release: How to use personas during the

stages of product development ............................................................119

CONTENTS

viii

Stage 1. Use personas to plan your product .........................................120

Stage 2. Use personas to explore design solutions ...............................130

Use personas to help you explore visual design solutions ......................148

Adult personas and developers ............................................................150

Stage 3. Use personas to evaluate your solutions .................................151

Stage 4. Use personas to support the release of your product ...............157

Transitioning into lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement ................160

Summary ...........................................................................................161

CHAPTER 7 Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement...........................163

What are lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement for personas? ......163

Step 1. Measure the return on investment of your persona effort ...........164

Step 2. Decide how to manage the transition to the next project ............165

Summary ...........................................................................................168

APPENDIX A Ad hoc persona example.....................................................................171

Company: ACME professional association for CPAs ...............................171

Gary getting started ............................................................................171

Meet gary ...........................................................................................171

APPENDIX B Data-driven persona example..............................................................173

Description .........................................................................................173

Tanner’s goals and desires ..................................................................175

What does Tanner want from G4kids.com?............................................176

Tanner’s computer and internet usage ..................................................176

Research report references .................................................................180

APPENDIX C Case study: G4K (games 4 kids) kids’ web portal................................183

Introduction ........................................................................................184

G4K persona family planning ...............................................................184

The G4K persona team fi nd some much needed data free

web-based data sources ......................................................................186

G4K persona conception and gestation ................................................189

Identifying factoids and transferring them to sticky notes .......................191

Assimiliating factoids ..........................................................................192

Identifying subcategories of users and creating skeletons ......................194

Discussing priorities ............................................................................195

Completing the personas .....................................................................197

G4K persona birth and maturation .......................................................199

G4K persona adulthood .......................................................................201

Using personas for competitive analysis ...............................................201

Using personas for feature brainstorms ................................................205

Creating a persona-weighted feature matrix ...........................................206

Using a scenario collection spreadsheet ...............................................206

G4K measures the ROI of the persona effort ........................................210

Measuring product improvements.........................................................211

Measuring process improvements ........................................................212

Preparing personas for the next project ................................................213

Bibliography .............................................................................................................215

Index.......................................................................................................................217

ix

Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle,

Washington. Tamara’s focus is on … focus! She’s an expert at wrangling executive teams until

they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she

believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the

best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with

executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘ in the trenches ’to design and

develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind

Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has

been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life,

Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer

experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of

Seattle tech startups after getting her Master’s Degree in Technical Communication from

the University of Washington. Today, she’s happily focusing on practical methods that help

business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she’s got her

work cut out for her.

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version

of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Offi ce 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft

in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows

(including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated

Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the

Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he

was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced

Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian

scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in

experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of

journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision￾making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using

personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring

numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the

book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design , with Tamara

Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry

events.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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1

CHAPTER

What are personas?

INTRODUCTION

Personas are fi ctitious, specifi c, concrete representations of target users. The notion of

personas was created by Alan Cooper and popularized in his book The Inmates Are Running

the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams

Publishing, 1999). Personas put a face on the user — a memorable, engaging, and actionable

image that serves as a design target. They convey information about users to your product

team in ways that other artifacts cannot.

Personas have many benefi ts:

● Personas make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common

language with which to talk about users meaningfully.

● Personas allow you to focus on and design for a small set of specifi c users (who are not

necessarily like you), helping you make better decisions.

● Personas engender interest and empathy toward users, engaging your team in a way that

other representations of user data cannot.

In other words, personas will help you, your team, and your organization become more user

focused.

WHY A PERSONA LIFECYCLE?

We originally wrote The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design

because lots of people were excited about personas, but:

● No one had described, in practical terms, how to create personas.

● No one had described specifi c tools for using personas during a product development

process.

● Practitioners who had tried personas had failed in their efforts more often than they had

succeeded.

1

Introduction 1

Why a Persona Lifecycle? 1

The Five Phases of the Persona Lifecycle 2

Why Another Persona Lifecycle Book? 4

What Additional Materials Will I

Find in the Original Persona

Lifecycle Book? 4

CHAPTER OUTLINE

CHAPTER 1

What are personas?

2

We looked into why so many persona efforts were failing, and we found four common

reasons:

1. The effort was not accepted or supported by the leadership team.

2. The personas were not credible and not associated with methodological rigor and data.

3. The personas were poorly communicated.

4. The product design and development team employing personas did not understand how

to use them.

The Persona Lifecycle was a solution: an end-to-end set of methods and tools designed to

support persona practitioners from the moment they decided to try personas until well after

the completion of a project. The persona lifecycle is built on several core assertions, all of

which arose from our research and experience:

● Building personas from assumptions is good; building personas from data is much, much

better.

● Personas are not documents. They are shared ideas around who your users are that must

come to life in the minds of the people in your organization.

● Personas are a highly memorable, inherently usable communication tool if they are

communicated well.

● Personas can be initiated by executives or fi rst used as part of a bottom-up grass-roots

experiment, but eventually they require support at all levels of an organization.

● As long as personas are well built, data driven (or otherwise validated and agreed upon),

and thoughtfully communicated, the product team can use the personas that come to

exist to generate new insights and seek out the right details when they need them.

● Personas are not a stand-alone, user-centered design (UCD) process but should be

integrated into existing processes and used to augment existing tools.

● Effective persona efforts require organizational introspection and strategic thinking.

● Personas can be created and show their value quickly, but if you want to obtain the full

value from personas you will have to commit to a signifi cant investment of time and

resources.

We understand that the devil is in the details when it comes to launching a persona effort

within an organization, and we are excited to share specifi c techniques that will help you

succeed in your own persona efforts and in turn help your organization realize the benefi ts

of truly UCD.

The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle

The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases

similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 1.1 , the fi ve

phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona

creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:

● Family planning — Before you begin any persona effort, you should fi gure out what

problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifi cally, data sources) are already

available for you to use.

● Conception and gestation — Organize assumptions; turn data into information and

information into personas.

● Birth and maturation — Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your

organization.

● Adulthood — Use the personas in specifi c ways to help during the design, development,

evaluation, and release of your product.

● Lifetime achievement and retirement — Measure the success of the persona effort and create a

plan to reuse or retire the personas.

CHAPTER 1

What are personas?

3

As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As

Figure 1.1shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood

phase. Note also that the fi nal stage, lifetime achievement and retirement , is not immediately

followed by a cyclical return to the fi rst stage. This is because different persona efforts

culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired

depending on the project.

More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more

important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be.

Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember

that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the

amount of time, resources, and data you have.

The persona lifecycle doesn’t have to take a long time. You can, and should, be selective in

the techniques you choose to integrate into your persona effort. Although we do not think

it is a good idea to skip any of the lifecycle phases completely, we do believe it is completely

acceptable to take some shortcuts within any of the phases. Giving some attention to every

phase will increase the odds that your persona effort will ultimately be successful. Your

overall goal should be to create helpful and well-used personas, not to follow the process

described in this book to the letter. Throughout the book, we suggest both complete end-to￾end processes and helpful shortcuts. We point out the processes we believe to be the most

important and effective, and you can treat each chapter as a menu of techniques and tools

that can be used together or independently.

Family Planning

Conception & Gestation

Birth & Maturation

Adulthood

Lifetime

Achievment

& Retirement

FIGURE 1.1

The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from

family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and fi nally lifetime achievement

and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is

covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

CHAPTER 1

What are personas?

4

WHY ANOTHER PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?

The original version of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design

is rich in details, examples, philosophy, and stories from the fi eld. It was written to give

you the full context around every aspect of persona creation, communication, and use, in

addition to as many tools and tricks as we could fi nd. The original is a reference tome that

will help practitioners navigate the specifi c needs of their own organizations …and get past

the inevitable hurdles everyone faces during a persona effort.

This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is

completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the

particular tool or method is the right one. For that reason, we have signifi cantly shortened

the entire book, and we have further abridged the chapters that did not include critical steps

in the persona creation and use process.

We have focused the content as follows:

● Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you get organized

● Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to

completed personas

● Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about your

personas out to your teammates at the right time

● Adulthood — Specifi c tools that will ensure your personas are used by the right people at

the right times (and in the right ways!) during the product development cycle

● Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you

measure the success of your persona effort …and prepare for the next one

Again, we don’t recommend that you skip any step in the persona lifecycle (even those that

we cover very briefl y here). In this book, we include some guidelines that will help you with

every phase, no matter how much time you have. Our goal is to help you give some thought

to important issues and jot down some basic information. A little upfront work will be

incredibly helpful when you need to justify your project, capture lessons learned, and plan

for your next persona effort.

WHAT ADDITIONAL MATERIALS WILL I FIND IN THE

ORIGINAL PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?

Our original book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design , is a

lot longer than this edition, which provides a very practical — in some cases, a step-by-step —

description of the basics of the persona lifecycle; the original includes much more in-depth

content. Several chapters in this edition, including those on family planning and retirement

and lifetime achievement, have been radically shortened; they tell you what you need to

do but do not include details on how to do some of these steps. The chapter on birth and

maturation is shortened, but not as drastically; it still contains some specifi c how-to methods

and suggestions. The chapters on conception and gestation and adulthood are also still quite

detailed, and they include a few important updates based on lessons we’ve learned since our

original book was published.

Having said that, one of our most important insights into persona projects is that the

devil is always in the details. If you fi nd yourself stuck during the process, don’t despair.

Instead, consult the original persona lifecycle book for many more details and suggestions,

including:

● A complete history of the origin of personas

● Detailed analysis of why personas work and what causes them to fail

● Many “ bright ideas ”to help streamline your persona efforts