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Hooked on Personas  

:: Thursday, January 13, 2005 ::

Today's UIEtips newsletter, from Jared Spool and gang, featured an article on personas called "Perfecting Your Personas" by Kim Goodwin. They've been pitching their Know Your Users roadshow. This theme is hot and interest in understanding web site visitors is noticably getting more intense.

Though there, and elsewhere, the topic of personas is gaining exposure, in truth, Ms. Goodwin's article was first published in 2001. Perfecting Your Personas was a key article featured on the Cooper Interaction Design web site.

Jared Spool wrote an article recently that really gets into the meat of why we need to know and understand how and who is going to use our web sites and applications. His article, called Putting Context Into Context may have been overlooked because the words "user persona" or "conversions" or "know your user" weren't in the title, but all these things are exactly what he was writing about. Plus more.

"Three underlying elements contribute to whether a user will succeed with a design:

1. The attributes specific to the user - if you substituted a different user, you would get different results.
2. The attributes specific to the interface - if you substituted a different interface, you'd also get different results.
3. The attributes specific to the current context - attributes independent of the specific user and tool."

Still not convinced creating user personas or knowing your potential customers is vital? FutureNow.com's Bryan Eisenberg writes, in Still Falling Short in E(xceptional)-tail?, "Formulating how to interact with the nameless and faceless hordes isn’t an easy task, but that’s where your solution lies. And it’s the reason why you want to construct the persuasion architecture of your site based on personas and their buying-path scenarios."

Too technical? Don't be afraid to read Bryan's article. It gives logical examples of common ecommerce boo boos which you want to avoid.

Care to discuss any of this? The thread at Cre8asiteForums, called Do You Use Personas When You Work on a Site? offers suggestions from other web designers on how they go about creating and applying them to designs. Example:

"I use a set of Primary Personas, in dialogue with a Site Persona, as a tool for designing IA and page layouts.

I actually record the 'conversation' for each successful scenario as a script, and refine it to make sure that all the goals / success criteria are fulfilled for both the Primary Persona and the Site Persona (because sites have their own goals too)."

Lastly, if you're bored out of your mind, or simply have no freaking idea what I'm talking about, I invite you to visit User Personas, where I keep a pile of information on the topic.

Bring popcorn and a printer.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 1/13/2005 07:49:30 PM

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