Personas and the design process.

September 26, 2002 | 0 Comments

Ever wonder - what exactly is a persona? How do personas relate to design and how can they help me?

Well…

Personas are in essence, user sketches. You’d interview and observe many users and then use that data to create some sketches of typical users. A more in-depth description can be found here. I guess maybe they are somewhat like what Mark Pilgrim did with Dive into Accessibity. Jackie, Michael, Bill, Marcus, and Lillian are all characters and Mark gave us the sketches and then related how each accessibility point would benefit them. I see this as having the potential to be very helpful to the design process - especially when communicating design goals and decisions.

You can learn a bit about how to create personas by reading Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data by Kim Goodwin.

Although the examples she uses are online shopping based for the most part, I would think you could apply this to almost anything.

I’ll post more as I learn more.

Filed under: IA and Usability