The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas

The Essential Persona Lifecycle

The Essential

Persona Lifecycle

Your Guide to Building and

Using Personas

Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Dedication

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHAPTER 1 What are personas?

CHAPTER 2 The five phases of the persona lifecycle

CHAPTER 3 Persona family planning

CHAPTER 4 Persona conception and gestation

CHAPTER 5 Persona birth and maturation

CHAPTER 6 Persona adulthood

CHAPTER 7 Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement

APPENDIX A Ad hoc persona example

APPENDIX B Data-driven persona example

APPENDIX C Case study: G4K (games 4 kids) kids’ web portal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is an imprint of Elsevier

30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Application submitted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-12-381418-0

For information on all Morgan Kaufmann publications,

visit our web site at www.mkp.com or www.elsevierdirect.com

Typeset by MPS Limited, a Macmillan Company, Chennai, India

www.macmillansolutions.com

Printed in China

10  11  12  13  14  5  4  3  2  1

This book is dedicated to the hundreds of brave souls who have participated in our workshops and worked with us as clients or colleagues over the past 10 years. Your creativity and experiences helped us build this process, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and we both adore our families and friends. Your support (and patience) mean the world to us.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle, Washington. Tamara’s focus is on...focus! She’s an expert at wrangling executive teams until they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘in the trenches’ to design and develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life, Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of Seattle tech startups after getting her Master’s Degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington. Today, she’s happily focusing on practical methods that help business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she’s got her work cut out for her.

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows (including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, with Tamara Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry events.

CHAPTER 1

What are personas?

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction

Why a Persona Lifecycle?

The Five Phases of the Persona Lifecycle

Why Another Persona Book?

What Additional Materials Will I Find in the Original Persona Lifecycle Book?

INTRODUCTION

Personas are fictitious, specific, concrete representations of target users. The notion of personas was created by Alan Cooper and popularized in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams Publishing, 1999). Personas put a face on the user—a memorable, engaging, and actionable image that serves as a design target. They convey information about users to your product team in ways that other artifacts cannot.

Personas have many benefits:

• Personas make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common language with which to talk about users meaningfully.

• Personas allow you to focus on and design for a small set of specific users (who are not necessarily like you), helping you make better decisions.

• Personas engender interest and empathy toward users, engaging your team in a way that other representations of user data cannot.

In other words, personas will help you, your team, and your organization become more user focused.

WHY A PERSONA LIFECYCLE?

We originally wrote The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design because lots of people were excited about personas, but:

• No one had described, in practical terms, how to create personas.

• No one had described specific tools for using personas during a product development process.

• Practitioners who had tried personas had failed in their efforts more often than they had succeeded.

We looked into why so many persona efforts were failing, and we found four common reasons:

1. The effort was not accepted or supported by the leadership team.

2. The personas were not credible and not associated with methodological rigor and data.

3. The personas were poorly communicated.

4. The product design and development team employing personas did not understand how to use them.

The Persona Lifecycle was a solution: an end-to-end set of methods and tools designed to support persona practitioners from the moment they decided to try personas until well after the completion of a project. The persona lifecycle is built on several core assertions, all of which arose from our research and experience:

• Building personas from assumptions is good; building personas from data is much, much better.

• Personas are not documents. They are shared ideas around who your users are that must come to life in the minds of the people in your organization.

• Personas are a highly memorable, inherently usable communication tool if they are communicated well.

• Personas can be initiated by executives or first used as part of a bottom-up grass-roots experiment, but eventually they require support at all levels of an organization.

• As long as personas are well built, data driven (or otherwise validated and agreed upon), and thoughtfully communicated, the product team can use the personas that come to exist to generate new insights and seek out the right details when they need them.

• Personas are not a stand-alone, user-centered design (UCD) process but should be integrated into existing processes and used to augment existing tools.

• Effective persona efforts require organizational introspection and strategic thinking.

• Personas can be created and show their value quickly, but if you want to obtain the full value from personas you will have to commit to a significant investment of time and resources.

We understand that the devil is in the details when it comes to launching a persona effort within an organization, and we are excited to share specific techniques that will help you succeed in your own persona efforts and in turn help your organization realize the benefits of truly UCD.

The five phases of the persona lifecycle

The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 1.1, the five phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:

• Family planning—Before you begin any persona effort, you should figure out what problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifically, data sources) are already available for you to use.

• Conception and gestation—Organize assumptions; turn data into information and information into personas.

• Birth and maturation—Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your organization.

• Adulthood—Use the personas in specific ways to help during the design, development, evaluation, and release of your product.

• Lifetime achievement and retirement—Measure the success of the persona effort and create a plan to reuse or retire the personas.

FIGURE 1.1

The five phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and finally lifetime achievement and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As Figure 1.1 shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood phase. Note also that the final stage, lifetime achievement and retirement, is not immediately followed by a cyclical return to the first stage. This is because different persona efforts culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired depending on the project.

More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be. Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the amount of time, resources, and data you have.

The persona lifecycle doesn’t have to take a long time. You can, and should, be selective in the techniques you choose to integrate into your persona effort. Although we do not think it is a good idea to skip any of the lifecycle phases completely, we do believe it is completely acceptable to take some shortcuts within any of the phases. Giving some attention to every phase will increase the odds that your persona effort will ultimately be successful. Your overall goal should be to create helpful and well-used personas, not to follow the process described in this book to the letter. Throughout the book, we suggest both complete end-to-end processes and helpful shortcuts. We point out the processes we believe to be the most important and effective, and you can treat each chapter as a menu of techniques and tools that can be used together or independently.

WHY ANOTHER PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?

The original version of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design is rich in details, examples, philosophy, and stories from the field. It was written to give you the full context around every aspect of persona creation, communication, and use, in addition to as many tools and tricks as we could find. The original is a reference tome that will help practitioners navigate the specific needs of their own organizations ... and get past the inevitable hurdles everyone faces during a persona effort.

This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one. For that reason, we have significantly shortened the entire book, and we have further abridged the chapters that did not include critical steps in the persona creation and use process.

We have focused the content as follows:

• Family planning—Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you get organized

• Conception and gestation—Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas

• Birth and maturation—Strategic techniques to get the right information about your personas out to your teammates at the right time

• Adulthood—Specific tools that will ensure your personas are used by the right people at the right times (and in the right ways!) during the product development cycle

• Lifetime achievement and retirement—Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you measure the success of your persona effort ... and prepare for the next one

Again, we don’t recommend that you skip any step in the persona lifecycle (even those that we cover very briefly here). In this book, we include some guidelines that will help you with every phase, no matter how much time you have. Our goal is to help you give some thought to important issues and jot down some basic information. A little upfront work will be incredibly helpful when you need to justify your project, capture lessons learned, and plan for your next persona effort.

WHAT ADDITIONAL MATERIALS WILL I FIND IN THE ORIGINAL PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?

Our original book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, is a lot longer than this edition, which provides a very practical—in some cases, a step-by-step—description of the basics of the persona lifecycle; the original includes much more in-depth content. Several chapters in this edition, including those on family planning and retirement and lifetime achievement, have been radically shortened; they tell you what you need to do but do not include details on how to do some of these steps. The chapter on birth and maturation is shortened, but not as drastically; it still contains some specific how-to methods and suggestions. The chapters on conception and gestation and adulthood are also still quite detailed, and they include a few important updates based on lessons we’ve learned since our original book was published.

Having said that, one of our most important insights into persona projects is that the devil is always in the details. If you find yourself stuck during the process, don’t despair. Instead, consult the original persona lifecycle book for many more details and suggestions, including:

• A complete history of the origin of personas

• Detailed analysis of why personas work and what causes them to fail

• Many bright ideas to help streamline your persona efforts

• Dozens of stories from the field written by other persona practitioners that will give you first hand insights based on their experiences and ideas for new methods and tools that have worked for them

• An extensive case study based on our fictitious company, G4K, which provides examples of all the materials related to a successful persona effort

In addition, the original book includes five invited chapters written by persona experts:

• Users, Roles, and Personas, by Larry Constantine

• Storytelling and Narrative, by Whitney Quesenberry

• Reality and Design Maps, by Tamara Adlin and Holly Jamesen

• Marketing Versus Design Personas, by Bob Barlow-Busch

• Why Personas Work: The Psychological Evidence, by Jonathan Grudin

But don’t worry: we’ve made sure to provide you with all the basics you’ll need as you embark on your persona effort right here in this book.

CHAPTER 2

The five phases of the persona lifecycle

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction

The Persona Lifecycle Encourages and Supports User-Centered Design

Phase 1. Persona Family Planning

Phase 2. Persona Conception and Gestation

Phase 3. Persona Birth and Maturation

Phase 4. Persona Adulthood

Phase 5. Persona Lifetime Achievement, Reuse, and Retirement

INTRODUCTION

The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 2.1, the five phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:

• Family planning—Before you begin any persona effort, you should figure out what problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifically, data sources) are already available for you to use.

• Conception and gestation—Organize assumptions; turn data into information and information into personas.

• Birth and maturation—Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your organization.

• Adulthood—Use the personas in specific ways to help during the design, development, evaluation, and release of your product.

• Lifetime achievement and retirement—Measure the success of the persona effort and create a plan to reuse or retire the personas.

As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As Figure 2.1 shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood phase. Note also that the final stage, lifetime achievement and retirement, is not immediately followed by a cyclical return to the first stage. This is because different persona efforts culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired depending on the project.

More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be.

FIGURE 2.1

The five phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and finally lifetime achievement and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the amount of time, resources, and data you have.

THE PERSONA LIFECYCLE ENCOURAGES AND SUPPORTS USER-CENTERED DESIGN

The persona lifecycle will work for you whether or not you have already incorporated user-centered design (UCD) methods into your product development cycle. The persona lifecycle does not replace existing processes; rather, the phases of the lifecycle help to structure user-centered thinking throughout whatever design and development process you have in place. In this section, we illustrate the ways the phases of the persona lifecycle will introduce UCD into your organization (if UCD methods have not yet been adopted) or enhance UCD methods already in practice.

Phase 1. Persona family planning

Persona development begins with family planning. This is the research and analysis phase that precedes the actual creation of personas. During family planning, you will focus on:

• Creating a core team of colleagues to help you with the entire persona effort

• Researching your own organization (which we call organizational introspection) to evaluate the problems and needs of your company, organization, or product—once you understand the needs you hope the persona effort will address, you can evangelize the persona method and prepare the product development team for the persona effort

• User research and identification of data sources that will provide the raw materials for your personas

• Thinking strategically about how you will introduce and support the personas in your organization

Family planning ends when:

• You have established that personas are right for your organization and current project.

• You have buy-in from key individuals and have completed initial research and data gathering.

• The persona core team is in place.

• You have created a solid plan for the rest of the persona effort that suits your product team’s needs.

Phase 2. Persona conception and gestation

In the chapter on persona conception and gestation, we explain how to extract useful information from disparate data sources and use this information to build personas. We have included some new suggestions, process descriptions, and insights in this edition of our book; these reflect the evolution of our process since the publication of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design.

During the persona conception and gestation phase, the lifecycle process helps you decide:

• How many personas you will need to create to communicate the key information in your data

• Which qualities and descriptive elements you should include in your persona documents and how to tie these elements back to your original data sources

• How to prioritize and validate your personas

• How to decide when your personas are complete and ready to be introduced to your product team

A lot of the work during the conception and gestation phase centers on collaboratively filtering data and organizing information—information that arises out of the data you collect in family planning and information that arises from other sources, such as inherent knowledge of how people behave, your business or product strategy, the competitive marketplace, and technological affordances related to your product domain. The information you identify will help you understand the particular user roles, user goals, and user segments that uniquely describe your target users. When you have isolated information about your users’ roles, goals, and segments, you will be able to determine what personas you should create to capture and communicate the most relevant qualities of (and differences among) target users related to your product domain and business strategy.

When you have completed the process described in the chapter on conception and gestation, you will have translated raw data and insights into a set of complete, robust personas that are ready to participate in the product design process.

Phase 3. Persona birth and maturation

Like parents sending young children off to school, you and your core team will send your personas into your organization to interact with other people. The personas are fully formed but may continue to evolve slightly over time. Moreover, throughout the remainder of the development cycle, your personas will continue to develop in the minds of your product team. Problems at this phase might involve a lack of acceptance or visibility and other problems that lead to personas that die on the vine and disappear from the project. More subtly, your personas may come to be misconstrued and misinterpreted. Successful persona birth and maturation require a strong, clear focus on communication to ensure that your personas are not just known and understood but also adopted, remembered, and used by the product team. The chapter on birth and maturation includes:

• Creating a persona campaign plan to organize your work in birth and maturation and adulthood

• Introducing the personas (and the persona method) to the product team

• Ensuring that the personas are understood, revered, and likely to be used (for example, creating artifacts to progressively disclose persona details)

• Managing the minor changes to the persona descriptions that become necessary after the personas are introduced

We help you decide which of many artifacts to create and when and how to use them to keep the personas (and the data they contain) fresh in the minds of the product team. We also give you pointers on maintaining the delicate balance of sharing ownership of the personas (and the details they contain) while ensuring that new or altered details don’t threaten the integrity of the underlying data.

Phase 4. Persona adulthood

Personas are all grown up in the adulthood phase, and have a job to do. You have introduced the personas to the product team and have worked to clarify the role and importance of the personas. You have encouraged the product team to embrace the personas and the information they contain, and now it is time to help everyone use the personas to inform the design and development of the product.

The effective persona practitioner must understand the many ways personas can be involved in existing processes and ensure that the personas work hard in an organization during the core development phases.

Personas can be used to help you plan, design, evaluate, and release your products. Personas can also inform marketing, advertising, and sales strategy. The chapter on adulthood is full of practical tools and suggestions to ensure that your personas have real impact—that they get used in a meaningful way by your product team.

Phase 5. Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement

Once the project or product is completed, it is time to think about what has been accomplished and to prepare for the next project. You will want to assess how effective the persona method was for your team and product development process. If you are beginning to think about the next product (or next version of the product just released), you will need to decide whether and how you will reuse your existing personas and the information they contain.

The end of a product design and development cycle is a good time to assess the effectiveness of personas for the team and to take stock of lessons learned for the next time. How did the development team accept the method? Were your personas useful? To what extent were they accurate and precise? We provide suggestions and tools you can use to validate the use of personas in the development process and to determine if the persona effort was worth the exertion and resources it required. Did personas change the product? Did they change your design and development process? User-centered designers are constantly under pressure to validate the worth and return on investment (ROI) of their activities, and personas can be useful tools for measuring the success of both the product and of the UCD (user-centered design) activities as a whole.

CHAPTER 3

Persona family planning

CHAPTER OUTLINE

What Is Family Planning for Personas?

Organizational Introspection: Are Personas Right for Your Project?

Step 1. Build a Core Team

Step 2. Identify Goals

Creating Clear Goals Now Will Help You Measure ROI Later

Step 3. Create an Action Plan

Step 4. Get Your Hands on Some Data

Stay Organized 16

Get Ready for Conception and Gestation!

WHAT IS FAMILY PLANNING FOR PERSONAS?

Family planning is the first phase in your persona process. It is the time when you will do some investigation and strategic thinking about your organization and its approach to user-centered design (UCD) and development. Your personas will not be introduced to the rest of your organization until the birth and maturation phase, but the ultimate success you have with them depends a lot on the work you do during the family planning phase. It is critical that you use this time to think up front about what happens after the personas are created.

There are four major activities during the family planning phase:

• Building a core team

• Researching your own organization (organizational introspection)

• Creating an action plan

• Collecting data

In this version of our book, we introduce the basic steps you should complete during the family planning phase. As you’ll see, much of family planning is about thinking, planning, assessing, and gathering materials. For more detailed suggestions related to family planning, see the related chapter in The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind During Product Design.

ORGANIZATIONAL INTROSPECTION: ARE PERSONAS RIGHT FOR YOUR PROJECT?

Your first job is to take a realistic look at the problems your team and organization are trying to solve and decide if personas will help. Don’t skip this step to save time, even if your team needed personas a month ago. We define organizational introspection as the process of evaluating the problems and needs of your company, organization, and product team. Organizational introspection is, in simple terms, working to answer the following questions:

• How user focused is your company?

• How do people think and communicate about users?

• How is user information incorporated into the product design and development process?

Do a thorough job in examining the personalities and politics that surround you. Only then can you decide if personas are the right way to address the problems facing your organization and product team and, if so, how you should introduce and maintain the personas to ensure maximum acceptance. If you conclude that personas are appropriate for your team, process, and product needs, you will then be ready to assemble a team, create a plan to ensure that your personas will be used and found helpful, and begin collecting data.

STEP 1. BUILD A CORE TEAM

Even if your team is just you and one other person, the discussions you will have will provide you with a critical perspective on your work and on the decisions you are making that you simply cannot arrive at by yourself. You need a persona core team because:

• Personas can be a lot of work for just one person.

• Discussion and debate are critical activities in the persona creation process.

• Getting your personas accepted and used requires cross-organizational buy-in.

In most cases, we have found that effective persona core teams include a minimum of two and a maximum of ten members. In our experience, teams with over ten members require too much coordination and quickly become unmanageable. The ideal persona core team has three to five active members and several other members in an advisory or on-call role.

Plan to include the people who are already involved in user research, market research, business analysis, task analysis, or any other user- or customer-focused research or profiling activity. If you have colleagues in any of the following specialties, you should put them on the short list for inclusion on the core team:

• Information architects, interaction designers, and human–computer interaction (HCI) specialists

• Usability specialists, user researchers, and ethnographers

• Technical writers, documentation specialists, and training specialists

• Market researchers, business analysts, and product managers

STEP 2. IDENTIFY GOALS

One of your jobs, as a user-centered designer, is to help build focus in your organization. Personas will help you to do this, but they aren’t the only tool at your disposal. Before you dive head-first into creating personas, you should do everything you can to articulate (and get sign-off on!) a very specific set of goals. These goals will help you keep your executive team on track during the adulthood phase of the lifecycle, and they will help you measure the success of the project.

We recommend this (deceptively simple) set of questions:

1. What are the top three to five business goals for your product or service? Business goals are expressed in numbers. They describe the needles that this project should help to move. A statement such as increase revenue and decrease costs isn’t specific