Personas in a Nutshell

These are some class notes I took from my interaction design class focusing on personas. Thought it would be helpful for everyone out there.

PERSONAS

• Be sure to design your site with your clients in mind. Not only demographics, but psycographics as well. What are their buying habits? what are they looking for?
• Also be sure to design around their needs and goals. What are they looking to do? Does your website perform this task? How effective is it?

How are needs defined?

• By programmers? Users are going to need to be experts
• By marketers? Site will be focused on beginners, since they are the easiest people to please
• Should be based on intermediate users.
• Logic says that to satisfy a broad audience, you should make applications as broad in functionality as possible to please the most people. THIS LOGIC IS FLAWED!!
• Personas are PRECISE DESCRIPTIVE MODELS of users based on the goals, behaviors and motivations of real people and represent them throughout the design process.

Why Personas?

• determine what a product should do and how it should behave
• communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers
• build consensus and commitment to the design
• they resolve user-centered design issues (three in particular) 1. the elastic user (your user keeps changing, and so does your design) 2. Self referential design (you are NOT your target audience) and 3. design edge cases

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