Projects/Usability/HIG/Persona

Purpose

A persona is the representation of a virtual user, based on empirical data. The description includes a concise summary of characteristics of the user, their experience, goals and tasks, pain points, and environmental conditions. Personas describe the target users, giving a clear picture of how they're likely to use the system, and what they’ll expect from it.

The advantage of persona is a common understanding over the development team and the dissociation from the personal point of view. In contrast to alternative methods like lead user(s) (usually the developer itself), a panel of real users or a description per sociological milieus, persona are more representative, faster to access, and easier to understand.

Guidelines

• Always define persona on ground of empirical data.
• Add enough information to establish a good impression of the target user. But do not write a novel and stay concise.
• Common elements are: name, job titles and major responsibilities, demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status, goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the application, physical, social, and technological environment.
• Add a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona and a casual pictures representing that user group.
• Discriminate between primary (the basic user) and secondary (additional users) persona. If it makes sense, describe the group of users that is explicitly not supported by a anti-persona. Respect the law of parsimony and have as few personas as possible.
• Make sure your persona can act in different scenarios.

Best Practice

• Try to use the predefined KDE personas.