Personas are an excellent tool for documenting an amazing array of requirements from users’ wants, needs, interaction preferences, and work behaviour to computer/information literacy and group membership dynamics. Unfortunately, many people just create them, do the tick and flick, and they never see the light of day again.
Once you’ve created Personas, here are a list of things to do with them next:
- Use them as the protagonists in storyboards
- Use them as the role headers for the swim lanes in workflow and business process diagrams
- Identify and explain role-behaviour in social computing models of interaction – creator, joiner, etc — to shape system requirements
- Include these as Actors in use-cases
- Classify their wants and needs as functional and non-functional requirements to reinforce traceability throughout the project
- Employ these as the starting points of role-based security
This is what I use Personas for. What do you use them for?
M
27 June, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I use personas as part of the technical implementation (through the usual you-know-what technologies), and since personas are supposed to be based on real user research, I add “coverage” to them, as in how many of the people who come to your application belongs roughly in this persona thing.
Next, I map personas (needs, wants, desires, antics, behaviors, etc.) to business ideals and goals to create the famed prototype. And here it gets interesting;
Each box (area) in my prototype must be linked to one or more personas or business item. Through the coverage attribute I can add up and display with a small bar (on the right edge of my boxes) what the assumed coverage of that box might be. For important pages, this has proven an invaluable way of scoping and designing functionality.
I also use personas to make posters I hang on walls where designers and developers sit.
I also use personas as test users (you can log into an application as “John, 53″
directly, so that when we do issue-tracking (say, with JIRA) the issue has both the testers name and what persona they used (the persona can have some technically defined properties, such as low sight, color blind, impatience, dyslexia, fear of big words, low concentration, and so on) to map the context in which the issue was raised.
I’m sure there’s more, but this is starting to turn into an article …
27 June, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Matt,
I wasn’t a real big fan of personas until I had to do an IA assignment at UC where I used personas to highlight particular web user needs. By using personas, I was able to make sense of a range of user characteristics that helped me work through some of the IA (it was that wireframe assignment I think you are probably familiar with!). Whilst I didn’t rely totally on the personas, they did help me understand a set of user-defined information far more coherently than had I listed user characteristics in isolation.
Regards,
Brad
20 August, 2008 at 12:21 am
[...] while back Matthew Hodgson had a glance over the usefulness of personas, I have to agree with what he had to say, they tend to be under [...]