Personas

Overview
A persona (or user persona) is a researched-constructed profile of archetypal user characteristics, goals, and needs. This user experience (UX) tool, helps designers make effective design choices by providing perspective and knowledge about the users.

Generally, personas are 1-2 pages of quantitative and qualitative user data. A persona will include a fictional name and picture, basic demographics, disabilities, personal and professional needs, and education level.

Personas help to support user-centered design (UCD) and are commonly used during usability testing. Companies will also use personas to help market products and services to stakeholders and customers. [1]

Features of Personas
The goal of a persona is to provide designers with an understanding of the different types of users and how they might interact with the product. Focused personas will help to highlight certain characteristics designers need to be aware of while making design choices. [2] Information and formatting may vary based on project needs, however, all personas provide designers with a  wide scope of end users.

Common features include:


 * 1) Fake name and profile picture


 * 1) Basic demographics (age, race, gender, education, marital status, preferred language, etc.)


 * 1) Biography containing personal interests, professional goals, and any other relevant information designers should know


 * 1) A summarizing quote


 * 1) Technology use/comfortability


 * 1) Disabilities, accessibility needs, or challenges


 * 1) Opinions and beliefs

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History
Variations of personas have existed since the 1960s as a tool for marketing. [3] Alan Cooper, however, is credited for developing the use of personas as a design tool after publishing his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. While working on writing a software program, Cooper interviewed a few of his colleagues to gain some understanding of potential users. From this small act, personas became a tool Cooper used to aid in all his projects. [3] At the launch of his book in 1999, Cooper introduced the concept of personas to a larger audience writing “[p]ersonas are not real people but they represent them throughout the design process…they are hypothetical archetypes of actual users…defined with significant rigor and precision.” [4] Since then, the use of personas has morphed into its own self-standing legitimate tool and is used by many fields beyond software writers. [2]

1. User Research
Personas are a product of the larger process of user research. The goal of user research is to identify the users who will interact with a design. [2] To gather all the data needed for personas, practitioners conduct internal research, interviews with users, and market research about users. [5]

2. Compiling, Organizing, and Summarizing the Raw Data
Compiling and organizing the raw data helps practitioners identify trends and outliers. While trends may indicate traits held by the majority of users, identifying the outliers helps practitioners to create compelling and distinctive personas. Once analyzed, the data can be summarized into a list of characteristics to help with writing the personas. [2]

3. Writing the Persona
The goal of writing a persona is to create unique profiles of potential users. Practitioners pull specific traits from the data to develop a complete profile filled with qualitative and quantitative data. [2] A practitioner will "extract characteristics from different people and aggregate them into one persona." [7]

Benefits
Persona help to:


 * highlight specific user characteristics, especially traits designers may not possess [5]


 * build empathy for the user from designers and stakeholders


 * reduce the abstract user into a "real" person


 * identify common attributes about users [1]


 * support better design choices by limiting the field of focus [1]

Disadvantages
Personas can cause:


 * designers to hyper-fixate on certain qualities [1]


 * characteristics some to be overlooked or completely ignored


 * racial or gender stereotyping of users [8]


 * confusion if designers do not know how to use them or if the personas are not evidence-based [1]