Using Personas to Create User-centered Designs
Allison Bloodworth
Senior User Interaction Designer
Educational Technology Services, University of California - Berkeley
Feb 3, 2009
Agenda
• What is user-centered design?
• What are personas?
• Gathering data about users
• Creating personas
• Using personas in the design & development
process
What is user-centered design?
• User-centered design is a product development
methodology based on actual user needs, behaviors,
abilities and perceptions.
• User-centered design is used by UC Berkeley because it
offers the most effective path to useful and usable
products.
• Personas put a human face on the amorphous “user”
because they are based on actual user needs. They save
time by focusing development toward real use cases and
away from unlikely “edge” cases.
User-centered design at
Berkeley
• Focuses on understanding:
– Who are the users?
– What are their goals?
• Goals drive a person‟s actions
• Tasks are things a person does in order to
accomplish his goals
– What are their pain points?
– What are their motivations?
• To drive system definition & design
Why focus on user goals vs.
(current) tasks?
• “The way people do things today is often merely the
product of the obsolete systems and and organizations
they are forced to interact with, and typically bear little
resemblance to the way they would like to do things, or
they way they would be most effective.”
– About Face 3.0
• Business process analysis is part of a user-centered
design process
User-centered design at
Berkeley
User Research
Modeling
Requirements Definition
UI Framework Definition
UI Design
Development Support
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User-centered design at Berkeley
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User-centered design at Berkeley
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User Research
• Ethnography and empathic research
– Observation & interviews
• Study users in their context
• Centered on users‟ goals and activities
• Look for patterns
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Modeling
• Make sense of research findings
– Personas
– Mental models
– Use cases - current or future processes
– Use case frequency matrix
– Activity diagrams - more complex processes
– Artifact models
• Helps gain consensus early on…before any design
happens
• Provides shared language & vision
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Persona: Michael the Moderately
Seasoned Professional
Source: Todd Warfel "Data Driven Personas”: http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-personas
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Requirements Definition
• Refined based on:
– User needs
– Business goals
– Customer needs
• Context Scenarios
– New processes, context of use
– How users complete an activity
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Scenarios
• A design technique used to envision future use of a system
– Focusing on how users can achieve their goals
– Helps designers & developers understand how system
will really be used
• A story about a particular persona interacting with the
system
• May be based on a use case, or a set of use cases
• Can be used for usability testing
• Scenarios become progressively more detailed
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Types of Scenarios
1. Context Scenarios
– High-level, no interaction details
– Focus is on how the user can achieve her goals
– Part of Requirements Definition phase
2. Key path scenarios
– Incorporate functional and data needs into the
scenarios
– Part of the next phase: UI Framework Definition phase
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Example Scenarios
• Context Scenario
– Lisa is in lecture and realizes she‟s confused when the instructor starts
talking about mitosis. She takes note of the time.
– Later that day she opens up her bSpace course site and goes directly to
the webcast for that day and reviews the portions of lecture via the
webcast she needed clarification on.
• Key Path Scenario
– Lisa is in lecture and realizes she‟s confused when the instructor starts
talking about mitosis. She takes note of the time.
– Later that day she opens up her bSpace course site clicks on the “Most
Recent Webcast” link. bSpace switches to the “Use Webcast” View
and the webcast for the day plays.
– Lisa looks at her notes to see the time she noted earlier, and enters it
into the “Lecture Time” field and presses “Enter.” The lecture jumps
forward to the point where the instructor was talking about mitosis.
UI Framework Definition
• High level design
– What pages do we have?
– What panes need to exist within the pages and how do
they work together?
– What design elements are included in each page, pane,
etc.?
– Should be a holistic view of the design, not too detailed
• Key path scenarios
• Allows for iterating on the details
• Start talking about technical feasibility
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UI design
“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose
meaningful order”
• Interaction design AND visual design
– How does it behave?
– What does it look like?
– How does it make users feel?
• Wireframes, mock-ups, and/or prototypes
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Development Support
• Constant communication
– No throwing it over the wall
• Continuous iterations as we learn more from
development
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What are personas?
• Basic definition
– “A persona is a user archetype you can use to help
guide decisions about product features, navigation,
interactions, and even visual design.” - Kim Goodwin,
Cooper
• User models
– Models can consolidate complex information into an
(easy to remember) abstraction
– Remembering & making sense of all the raw data would
be impossible without them
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Persona: Sarah Windsor,
Overwhelmed Faculty
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Sarah+Windsor+-+Primary+Persona
Source: Sakai
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Sarah+Windsor+-+Primary+Persona
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Persona do’s and don’ts
• Should:
– be based on user research
– be based primarily on qualitative research
– be focused on users‟ goals
– be based on common behavior patterns
– be specific to your design context or problem
– come to life, and seem like real people
• Should not:
– be focused on stereotypes or generalizations
– be an „average‟ of observed behavior patterns
– be based only on user roles
– be based only on information gathered from subject matter
experts, as they cannot completely represent end users
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Why use personas?
• Focus
• Empathy
• Gaining consensus
• Avoiding the elastic user
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Why use personas?
• Focus
– Designing for too many different types of users makes a
product too complex to truly satisfy any of them
– Pleasing some users often conflicts with pleasing
others--must have a way to make choices
– Helps prevent focusing the design on:
• edge cases
• averages
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Why use personas?
• Empathy
– People are wired to be attuned to other people
– Helps put yourself in the users‟ shoes
• Helps avoid self-referential design
– Facilitates the use of role playing to:
• make design decisions
• evaluate designs
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Why use personas?
• Gaining consensus
– Give the team a shared understanding (early on!) of
who they users are and what they need
• Without personas, the team may be disagreeing about who
the users are, rather than actual design decisions, without
even knowing it
– Gives the team a tool to reason through design
decisions
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Why use personas?
• Avoiding the elastic user
– If the users haven‟t been clearly defined, they may
stretch to fit the needs of the product team
• “Our students are very tech-savvy, and will certainly be able
to figure that out.”
• “Students just won‟t be able to understand how to do this.
We need to create a wizard.”
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Types of personas
• Design Personas
– User Personas (most common)
– Customer/Buyer Personas
– Served Personas
– Negative Personas
– Provisional Personas
• Other types of Personas
– Marketing Personas
– Strategy Personas
– Organization Personas
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Personas usually contain…
• Goals
• Attitudes (related to your context)
• Behaviors & Tasks (in your context)
• Photo
• Name
• Tagline
• Scenarios
• Demographic info
• Skill level
• Environment
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Types of personas
• Primary persona
– A persona whose needs must be satisfied
– Multiple primary personas require separate interfaces
• Secondary, tertiary, etc. personas
– Personas whose needs should be considered after
those of the primary persona(s)
– A persona is made secondary because their needs can
be mostly met if the design is focused on the primary
persona
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Primary Persona: Ernest the
Engaged Employee
“Work is important, but not my whole life.”
Personal Information
Profession: Data Architect
Age: 43
Background: Originally from upstate New York
Education: BS in Library Science from Columbia. Is continuing his education informally, by sitting in on classes at UC
Berkeley‟s School of Information whenever he can. Attends industry conferences about once a year.
UCB Background: “Fell” into a technical position at UC Berkeley 8 years ago after working in libraries.
Home Life: Has been married for 15 years and has two children, ages 6 and 13. Their family has a pet Cockatoo. He is
interesting in volunteering some time at his 6-year-old‟s Montessori School in Berkeley.
Hobbies: Photography (learning Photoshop)
Personality: Efficient, detail-oriented, dedicated. Enjoys meeting new people and learning about them.
User Goals
• To be as efficient as possible at work so he can spend as much quality time with his family as possible
• To make more money
• To continue to learn
• To improve his photography & perhaps make it more of a business
Pain Points
• After the IST re-org, some processes have been unclear, and he‟s often had to hunt around for the right person to get
things done.
• Too many passwords to remember
• Too many collaborative tools being used in organization
• Information he needs is all over the place, not organized efficiently
Site Objectives
• Help Ernest find the information he needs quickly & easily
• Clarify the IST/OCIO information available instead of adding just another site to the confusion
• Help Ernest learn about and connect with the IST/OCIO community
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Sakai Persona Map
From: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ENC/Sakai+Personas
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Methods used for gathering
information for personas
• User observation
• Contextual inquiries
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Diary studies
• Existing data
• Existing knowledge
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How are personas created?
• Persona hypothesis
• User research
• Identify behavioral variables/attributes
• Persona scales
• Choose personas
• Write personas
• Communicate personas
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Persona hypothesis
• A starting point to help determine what types of users to
research
• Created before talking to end users
– Based on information gathered from stakeholders, SME‟s, your
personal knowledge, and review of existing literature
– Hypothesized behavior patterns
– Should not be based purely on demographics
• Differentiate users based on needs and behaviors
– More user types can be added later if research points to other
types
– Often map to roles in a non-consumer domain (e.g. education)
• Can be just a rough outline/list of user goals & behavior
patterns you expect to see
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Fluid CM research: User
behavior/characteristic matrices
• User types (Roles)
• Technical level
• Application (CMS) use • Country/region
• Class structure • Type of institution
• Group size From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/vgIa
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User research
• Interview & observe users in the context of their work
• Use focus structure document to guide each user visit
• Take detailed notes & photos
– Capture interesting quotes
– Use symbols in notes to organize info
• Process „raw‟ notes into a more categorized & synthesized
format
• Create summaries of notes
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Raw notes
- Works both at home and in her (very organized) office; carries
her PC back and forth
- Seminar: posts multiple discussion questions each week, has
students respond to 1 each week. Part of participation grade
which is 25% of their total grade.
- Would like students to have a one stop shop where they can get
all info for her class: website, bSpace, Library Resources
- Throughout the semester she puts all her grades in Excel; she has
mostly quizzes and exams, and only has a few assignments
– Wants to be able to save copies of files having to do with students on
her local drive
• Helpful info if students ask for recommendations later
- She‟s usually only a week ahead of the class in her preparation,
which may change in the future when she‟s taught the class more
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Categorized Notes - Content
Management
• Interview/Observation Setup • Typical/Good/Bad day
• Persona Info (personal details) • Course Details
• Context of work • Schedule/Organization
• Teaching style/format • General CMS/LMS use &
activities
• Computer/Technology use • Types of course materials
• Use cases/Activities • Communication
• Pain points/Opportunities/Time • Content Reuse
wasters • Photos
• User goals
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Identify variables
• Personas should be based on observed behavior patterns
• Identify the behavioral variables which differentiate your
interviewees
• Two by two comparison - UIE.com method
– Read two randomly chosen summaries
– List attributes that make interviewees similar & different
– Replace one of the summaries with another randomly chosen
one
– Repeat until all summaries are read
• Choose endpoints of scales
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Persona scales
Distinctions
• Roles
• Support running class
• Timing of posting materials
• Primary type of communication
• Number of computers
• Overall goal
– change the field
– teach students
– get published
• Previous LMS use
• Years teaching
• Years at current institution
• Large, small or both classes
• Discipline
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Content+Management+Research+Models
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Choose personas
• Determine list of potential personas based on common
behavioral patterns
• Sanity check
– Do they make sense? Do they reflect what we‟ve seen? Are
there too many to be useful? Will they help us make design
decisions?
• Finalize initial persona list
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Write personas
• Draft persona characteristics & goals for each persona
– If possible, all info should come from actual user research (your notes)
– All persona information should be relevant to your design context
• Check persona set
– Anything missing?
– Any redundant personas?
• Write the persona descriptions
– Some bulleted lists, some narrative
– You may have multiple formats depending on your team‟s needs
– A few personal details OK
• Try to relate them to your design
• Add them last
• Choose primary, secondary, etc. persona(s)
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Fluid Content Management
Personas
Instructor Personas
Ahmad Yousef George Yousef
(Faculty - Tenure- Ahmad
McFadden
track History) (Faculty - Tenure- George McFadden
track Instructor
(Online History)
- Journalism) (Online Instructor - Henry Sibley
Journalism)
(Longtime Faculty -
Chemistry)
Catalina De Silva
(Faculty - GSI Manager
in Spanish)
Sergio Rossi Stacey Pearson
(Graduate Teaching (Graduate Teaching
Robin McCoy Assistant - Urban Assistant - Biochemistry)
(Faculty - Business School) Affairs & Planning)
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Content+Management+Research+Models
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Fluid Content Management
Personas
Student Personas
Christy Gonzola Ashley Myles Shaina Wiseman Andy Wright
(Undergraduate Student (Undergraduate (Graduate Student - (Graduate Student -
- Molecular & Cell Student - Acheology) Land Development) Information Studies)
Biology)
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Content+Management+Research+Models
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Fluid Content Management
Personas
Instructional Support Staff Personas
Michael Demsky Anita Stalmach
(Departmental Support - Biology) (Departmental Pedagogy
Support - Instructional
Designer)
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Content+Management+Research+Models
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Stacy Pearson - TA Trainer/
Graduate Teaching Assistant
• Characteristics
– Lives in the suburbs, about 40 minutes outside the city by
car, with her parents
– Is a 3rd year PhD student with a specialty in Biochemistry,
and has been TAing since 2004
– Comes in everyday at 6:30am and spends all day on
campus until around 5pm. She does most of the work on
campus, in the lab and in her office, and none at home.
– She coordinates the TA training program where she trains
TAs through the office of Teaching Advancement. With "I'm all manual. Papers,
other coordinators, she organizes workshops for TAs on folders, and binders.”
how to teach students.
– She uses Blackboard as a TA but is not a huge fan. She Main Points:
only login when she gets an email notification with Uses physical folders, binders,
important announcements. and drawers to organize her
– She uses a highly paper-based file organization system. reading materials
She prints out course materials and organizes them into Teaches TAs how to teach
binders in chronological order. students
– If she needs to take files home, she emails her files to her Concerned about Mac-PC
Yahoo account. compatibility when transferring
• Goals files
– Get her PhD Frustrated that she doesn't
– Become a better teacher have access to the LMS her
students are using
From: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/fY4
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Communicate personas
• Introductory workshop
• Posting one or two page summaries in work areas
• Laminated sheet containing short summaries of all
personas
• Persona deck of cards
• Have everyone put a persona on their door to
represent who they identify with
• Set up a work area for a persona
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Persona Resources
• Books
– About Face 3.0
– The Persona Lifecycle
– Practical Personas: The User Is Always Right
• Presentations
– UIE's Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less:
http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/building_personas/
– "data driven design research personas:"
http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-design-research-
personas
– "The user is always right: Making Personas Work for Your Site:"
http://www.slideshare.net/MulderMedia/the-user-is-always-right-making-
personas-work-for-your-site
• Articles
– Building a data-backed persona:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/building-a-data
– Personas vs. User Descriptions:
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/15/personas-vs-user-
descriptions-apples-vs-tomatoes/
Questions?
• Check out the Fluid Design Handbook:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Design+Handbook
• Contact info:
– Allison Bloodworth, Educational Technology Services:
abloodworth@berkeley.edu
Persona Example: Matthew
Johnson, USDA Senior
Manager
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS),
http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html
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