This document discusses personas, which are models of user goals and behaviors used to represent different user segments. Personas should be based on well-researched data from real users and presented as vivid narratives. They help product teams make better decisions by putting a face to the end user. Many large companies formally use personas in design processes. The document outlines steps for developing personas, including identifying user categories, processing research data, creating skeleton personas, and validating the final personas. It provides an example of a sample persona and discusses best practices for persona evaluation and lifecycle management.

1. Taking the “You” out of User
Persona creation, evaluation and use
TIBCO User Experience
January 2008
Copyright 2007 TIBCO Software. Proprietary and Confidential

2. Personas – what and why

3. What is a Persona?
A model of user goals, attitudes, and behaviors
and a key member of a product design and
development team
A good Persona is…
• crafted from well-researched, well-understood data
about many real individuals
• presented as a vivid, narrative description
• consolidated into a single “person” to
represent a user segment
• well-publicized

4. Personas should not be…
• based on one person’s or even
several people’s opinions
• built as an exercise and then
hidden away
• confused with Users, Roles or
Skill Inventories
• easy to create
• a dramatic shift in the way to
design and build products

5. What will personas do for us?
• Put a face on the end user
• Provide an environment for better decision
making
• Help us increase product value, usability and
sale-ability
• Streamline design and development
• Make us more confident in design and decisionmaking.

6. Why do we need personas?
Building products based on what (real)
people need seems obvious, but...
– A user-centered approach isn’t natural
– Designers, engineers and product managers
are not users
– People are complicated
– Communication is difficult

7. But, we build for the user already, don’t we?
• User-centric design is a vague ideal with lots of
potential tools and processes
• Personas are at the center of a specific PROCESS
Persona
User
Specific life story
Anything to
anyone
Published
Difficult to talk
about
Every attribute
linked to research
Based on an
opinion

8. Personas vs. Roles and Skills?
Persona
Role
Skill
Inventory
Describes
what a
person is
Describes
what a
person does
Describes
what a
person
knows

9. Who uses formal personas?
• Automotive:
– Chrysler (B2C)
– Ford (B2C)
– MINI Cooper (B2C)
• Financial services:
–
–
–
–
Discover (B2C)
E*TRADE (B2C)
Fidelity (B2B, B2C)
Sovereign Bank (B2B,
B2C)
• Manufacturing:
– Dell (B2C, B2B)
• Retail:
– Amazon (B2C)
– Best Buy (B2C)
– Staples (B2B, B2C)
• Shipping:
– FedEx (B2B, B2C)
– UPS (B2B, B2C)
• Technology:
–
–
–
–
Analog Devices (B2B)
Microsoft (B2B, B2C)
Nortel (B2B)
SAP (B2B)

10. Persona development and use

11. Forrester’s Persona Lifecycle
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Family planning
Conception and gestation
Birth and maturation
Adulthood
Lifetime achievement,
reuse and retirement

12. 6 Steps of Building 1/2
Conception
1. Identify important categories of users
2. Process the data
3. Identify and create skeletons

13. 6 Steps of Building 2/2
Gestation
1. Prioritize (select) the skeletons
2. Develop selected skeletons into personas
3. Validate the personas against the data

14. How to tell a persona story
•
•
•
•
•
Personal profile and job description
Resources and skills
A day in the life
The problem
A new day in the life

15. Sample persona

16. Sample
persona

17. The right number of personas
Source: Forrester research, September 10, 2004 “How To Design Sites That Satisfy Millions Of Users”

18. Persona evaluation
• Based on primary research (interviews)
with real users
• Sounds like a real person
• Compelling narrative
• Calls out key attributes and high-level goals
• Enables design decisions
• Usable
• Has appropriate production values
Adapted from Forrester Research

19. Persona success is not guaranteed
Ingredients for failure include:
• Lack of obvious need
• Lack of leadership support
• Not credible or based on real data
• Poor communication
• Ineffective use

20. Personas at TIBCO

21. How we intend to bring
Personas to TIBCO
• Evangelize the evolution from our
current Role Descriptions
• Conduct simple persona research on
one product
• Share the process and the results with
all interested parties.
• Commit to ongoing lifecycle
management with shared ownership

22. How we can get started
• Assumption Personas
• Existing role descriptions
• Primary research
• Affinity grouping
• Skeleton personas and
validation
• Launch, communication
and use
• Evaluation

23. What do I have to worry about?
• Nothing
• When we’ve got something useful to share,
everyone will know
• Doesn’t change anything about how we work
– Gives each of us more information
– Clarifies the definition and use of the tools we have

24. For the curious
• The Inmates Are Running
the Asylum
– [Cooper, 2004]
• The Persona Lifecycle
– [Pruitt and Adlin, 2006]
• About Face 2.0
– [Cooper and Reimann, 2003]
• Information Architecture:
Blueprints for the Web
– [Wodke, 2002]

25. Q&A

26. Taking the “You” out of User
Persona creation, evaluation and use
Copyright 2007 TIBCO Software. Proprietary and Confidential