The Limits of Personas

1. The Limits of Personas Peter Bagnall Guy Dewsbury Ian Sommerville

2. The use of personas • Designers create solutions • Need to test solutions to ensure appropriateness • User testing during design is impractical • Personas provide high-speed rough and ready testing

3. The use of personas • Personas are proxies for real users • Avoid self referential design • Used with scenarios (not use cases) • Guide design • Specific enough • Best to design for one ‘person’ • But that ‘person’ shouldn’t have gratuitous quirks

4. Why personas work • Perspective taking • Ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective • Learnt skill • Normally learnt around age 4 • Becomes richer with age • To develop it requires life experience • Similar skill to method acting

5. Making personas • You can’t just make them up! • Represent the archetypal user • Based on data from field studies and ethnographic research • Personas are not averages • Aim for a challenging but realistic target

6. Problems making personas • Relies on being able to gain an accurate understand of people • People aren't always comfortable talking about sensitive personal topics • Requires empathy, but empathy can be inaccurate • people can hide their feelings

7. Problems using personas • Not possible to see a design from a perspective you don't understand • Persona descriptions aren't detailed enough to help get that understanding • Designer must therefore have prior understanding of the archetype • Persona acts as an anchor

8. Problems using personas • Too many personas gets confusing • Becomes harder to get ‘into character’ • Most projects have a few personas to guide the design • Using personas to represent impairments too makes for a combinatorial nightmare

9. Questions?