IA Tools: Understanding your users through personas

Whether it’s for a website, a system, or for a communications strategy, knowing your users is a vital first step in getting an end product that suits their needs in a way that will make sense to them. Creating personas is an important part of understanding your users.

When I create personas I follow the following recipe:

Step One: Research

Don’t underestimate the power of research. Do formal research or go ask others within and without the project about the users. Sometimes, just having a chat over a cup of coffee is the most effective way of finding stuff out.

In working out who my users actually are, I apply something I learned from my days in communications marketing strategy – market segmentation – and ask myself the following questions:

Primary

Who is going to be directly benefit from this system?

Secondary

Who is going to be indirectly affected?

Tertiary

Who could influence the situation?

Step Two: Define, describe and document your users

I then use my research and anecdotal information to make a list of each user and each of their wants and needs. Once the list is made, I then see if there are groupings I can make in an attempt to genericise the users.

Genericising my users means I can talk about a user, their issues, and document them, without suggesting that I’m actually talking about Bob Smith from accounting.

Recently, I was dealing with a project that had several committees. Once I did some reading I found that each committee did pretty much the same sort of thing – meet, review, assess, and recommend. So, rather than having five secretatiates and lots of committee members, I just listed a single ’secretatiate’ user and a single ‘committee member’ user, and made them a little more generic to cover all the issues of each of the committees.

When considering how to describe each of the generic users, I try and answer the following questions:

• The needs and wants of each of the personas
• Situations – where, when and how they want to use your system
• The activities and interests of the users
• The users’ opinions on the system, the organisation and related issues
• How the user thinks
• What is likely to influence and motivate them

Step Three: Getting Creative

Next, I choose a theme.

The last theme I used was Heroes – the television series where people wake up with incredible abilities and then have to deal with them. I’ve also used X-Men and 60s/70s cartoon shows (like Space Ghost and Blue Falcon) as themes. This makes the final write-up a little more interesting and lots more fun. It’s a great way to see who reads the documents at the end of the day – they will certainly make a comment if they do.

Wikipedia is a good resource for information once you’ve decided on your theme. Give your each of your genericised users:

• A title to reflect the type of user
• A name, say, Ororo Monroe (Storm) for example
• A picture (very important) of someone that no one will recognise. This will put a human face to the needs and make them seem ‘more real’
• A bit of their background,
• Do they have any assessibility or usability needs, and
• Answer the questions, wants, and needs you’ve captured in your research

Viola!

Here’s an example of a completed persona I did for a project last year. The project was to deliver a system that would help with external stakeholders submitting documents to a government agency.

Stakeholder Liaison Officer
Ororo Munroe (Australian, Female) was born of Korean meteorologists who moved to Perth when she was in her teens. As a child, she travelled all over the world with her parents, chasing tornadoes, and now loves nothing more than to watch a storm brewing on the Western Australian coastline.Ororo was first introduced to Aboriginal culture while completing her Masters in linguistics on native dialects and is now a Stakeholder Liaison Officer in Western Australia, responsible for liaison between several service organisations and the government agency that she now works for. Her role is to ensure that Health Service Organisations deliver their reports on time and to the standard that her agency expects.

Ororo is highly skilled when it comes to computers and using the internet, but finds it difficult to locate ways of connecting to the internet when away from her home or office. Ororo has a few years experience in her role and finds that she often has to explain things to her colleagues who have very little knowledge of the reporting framework that involves the agency’s stakeholders.

From the reporting framework and her agency, Ororo wants:

• to know what the agency expects of her in her role as Project Officer in the reporting framework;
• to make sure that Health Service Organisations submit their reports;
• to make sure that reports she approves cover all of the agency’s funded areas;
• to be satisfied that a report shows the different areas of a Service Organisation’s work;
• reports from stakeholders to be easy to read and understand;
• less paperwork;
• simple tools to make it easy to hand-over action plans and reports to the agency;
• to know who she can turn to for help with the reporting framework;
• to be able to educate Health Service Organisations about how the agency describes and reports on Health Service Organisations’ activities; and
• to be able to educate others on the agency’s own reporting requirements

Making use of personas

Once your personas are done it’s a good idea to show them to the people you talked to in your research step. They’ll be able to tell you whether or not these ficticious people you’ve created actually represent whose involved and who will be affected.

Once they’ve been given the thumbs-up by the people they represent the next step is to show them to the Business Analysts (BAs) on the project so they can use them as actors in developing their use cases. This will give continuity between the work you’re doing and the business requirements gathering exercises that the BAs will be doing (assuming you’re not doing them yourself! …. there’s probably another blog post in that itself).

I’ve also noticed that not all of a persona’s wants and needs are about systems. Some wants and needs will highlight the importance for good change management strategies in your project. It might reveal the need for training, information or improvements to work process or governance frameworks. I like to use personas to highlight all of these issues through something called Want Maps … but that’s also another blog post.

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