A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype—whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood—you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype. In most cases, personas are synthesized from a series of ethnographic interviews with real people, then 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, or sometimes for each set of tools within a product, there is a small set of personas, one of whom is the primary focus for the design.
It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them.
Personas represent behavior patterns, not job descriptions
A good persona description is not a list of tasks or duties; it's a narrative that describes the flow of someone's day, as well as their skills, attitudes, environment, and goals. A persona answers critical questions that a job description or task list doesn't, such as: Which pieces of information are required at what points in the day? Do users focus on one thing at a time, carrying it through to completion, or are there a lot of interruptions? Why are they using this product in the first place?
There is seldom a one-to-one correlation between personas and job descriptions. In some cases there will be multiple personas with the same job description; in others, a single persona can represent people with a wide range of jobs. If you were creating software used by call center agents, for example, you might have an experienced agent persona who is very familiar with the product, as well as an inexperienced agent who needs more prompts and written information. If, on the other hand, you were designing an e-mail application, one persona could represent people with hundreds of very different job descriptions, as long as they all shared similar goals and behavior patterns related to communication.
Keep your persona set small
If you've ever read a book or watched a movie with an enormous cast of characters, you may have found it hard to remember who was related to whom, who said what, and so on. You probably didn't feel like you knew any of the characters very well. If you were designing a product for such a large cast of characters, could you predict how so-and-so's cousin (whose name you forget) would behave in a certain situation? Probably not. That's why a large set of personas is problematic—the personas all blur together.
Ideally, you should have only the minimum number of personas required to illustrate key goals and behavior patterns. There's no magic number, but if you're designing a consumer product and you have a dozen personas, then you may be making distinctions that aren't very important. For example, if you were creating an electronic family calendar, your persona set might include a career mom, a stay-at-home mom, a career dad, and a teenager. If the career mom has the same needs as the career dad, and also does all the family management the stay-at-home mom does, you may be able to eliminate both the dad and stay-at-home mom personas.
Your marketing and sales targets may not be your design targets
Many product managers and executives are surprised when there isn't a direct correlation between market segments and personas. The people who bring in the most revenue may not be the best design target. If you were designing an in-flight entertainment system, a frequent business traveler—every airline's most valued customer—would be a tempting design target. A business traveler would actually make a poor design target, though, because he would be too familiar with flying and with using computers and other gadgets. If you design for the business traveler, the retired bricklayer going to see his grandchildren won't be able to use the system. If you design for the bricklayer, the business traveler will also be happy.
