Lecture 4: Personas

Question 1

What is an elastic user?

Answer 1

An elastic user is a user which can mean everyone thus no one, it leads to the following:

• unfocussed design
• “self-centred” design (the user is them)
• inadequate products

Question 2

What are the three steps for understanding a user?

Answer 2

Step 1: Identify user groups
Step 2: User Research
Step 3: Making the user real - describing the user (this description can be captured in a persona)

Question 3

In step 2: User Research, what does it involve?

Answer 3

In order to complete the user research this step of understanding the user involves conducting user interviews and user observations.

Question 4

What are the SIX issues of User Research (Step 2)?

Answer 4

1. Unintegrated
2. Needs to be interpreted
3. High learning curve to assimilate
4. Too much for “casual” team members to use
5. Easy to forget over long project.
6. Easy to forget big picture

Question 5

What are personas?

Answer 5

Personas are fictitious, specific and concrete representations of target users. They can be a surrogate, based on research, pseudo-fictional character representing a user class, concrete descriptive model of intended user and as a set, explore ranges of classes and behaviours.
A persona will include a name, photo, goals and a mix of key characteristics, motivations, context, activities, narrative story, representative quotes and pain points.

Question 6

What are the four guidelines for developing personas?

Answer 6

1. Develop one persona for each significant user segment.
2. Attach personality, job description and life style profile to each persona
3. Give him / her name, a photo or description of what they look like
4. Use personas to perform need assessments, and develop task scenarios.

Question 7

What are the four reasons we use personas?

Answer 7

1. Personas make user-centred design possible
2. Personas make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common language with which to talk about users meaningfully which helps to avoid the elastic user.
3. Personas allow you to focus on and design for a small set of specific users, who are not necessarily like you, helping you make better decisions.
4. Personas engender interest and empathy towards users, engaging your team in a way that other representations of user data cannot.