Add life to the personas, but remember they're design tools first
Sometimes it's easy to focus too much on a persona's biography. Personal details can be the fun part, but if there are too many of them they just get in the way. To avoid this problem, focus first on the workflow and behavior patterns, goals, environment, and attitudes of the persona—the information that's critical for design—without adding any personality.
Once you have the critical design information, add just one or two personal details, such as what your persona does after work (she goes home to watch old movies with Claude, her cat), or what personal touches there are in her workspace. You can also add life to the persona by using environmental details to reinforce important characteristics. For example, if someone tends to be incredibly busy at work, don't just say he's incredibly busy; instead, say there's a sandwich on his desk that he's been trying to find time to eat for three hours. Without a little bit of personality, personas can easily turn into generic users instead of precise design targets.
Use the right goals
Each persona should have three or four important goals that help focus the design. Keep in mind that goals and tasks are different: tasks are not ends in themselves, but are merely things we do to accomplish goals. Not just any goals will do, though, so it's important to understand which types will help you make design decisions.
Life goals are only occasionally useful in design. For example, "Retire by age 45" would be of little use if you were designing a word processor, mobile phone, or PDA, but it may offer valuable insight when you're designing a financial planning tool.
Experience goals describe how the persona wants to feel when using a product; having fun and not feeling stupid are experience goals. Not every persona needs an experience goal; in most persona sets, there is one persona who represents people with a lot of anxiety about technology. One of this person's goals is to avoid feeling stupid. Other experience goals might center on the product domain. A persona using an online banking site, for example, might want to feel confident that his transactions are secure.
Most persona goals should be end goals that focus on what the persona could get out of using a well-designed product or service. End goals may involve the work product that results from using the tool. For example, a graphic designer using a layout tool might want to create an award-winning ad. End goals can also involve indirect benefits from using a product. If a manager wants to be more proactive, a better spreadsheet tool can help her achieve this goal if it makes her more efficient.
Personas must be specific to the design problem
Organizations with more than one product often want to use the same personas over and over ("We have a salesperson persona already—why can't we use her for the spreadsheet as well as the contact management software?"). Unfortunately, this doesn't work because effective personas must be context-specific—they should be focused on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a product. A persona's behaviors and goals related to contact management have very little to do with those related to manipulating financial data. You could keep the same name and personal details, but you'd have to throw away the rest of the persona and start over. It's better to start with a new set of personas for each product.
Want to know more?
Hopefully, these tips will help you refine your personas so you can get the most out of them. Look for more on personas, principles, and other aspects of interaction design in future issues of the Cooper Newsletter, and keep up the good work!
About the Author
Kim Goodwin is Director of Design at Cooper. Email her at kim@cooper.com.
