Personas are often used in design to help inspire team members with an understanding of the stakeholders - the folks who have a stake in a thing - for whom they're develeping and designing their stuff.
Personas are amalgams of attributes for a particular set of traits that make up a Type of User (or stakeholder) who has to carry out a task. These personas are also known as stereotypes. These stereotypes are really rich: they have names, ages, economic backgrounds, their likes/displikes; their jobs and other information about where the process of interest intersects with their lives.
Eg, Tony is a 34 year old white sales rep. He likes to dress up funky. He wears a shirt and tie, but uses a messenger bag rather than a brief case. He likes his double shot cap first thing in the morning. He's been in sales for 6 years and has been with his current team for 8 months.He has to make 2 sales a day to keep his job, so he's on the phone all the time. He does not have a lot of time to learn about new specs for the products he has to promote. He usually gets this information from links in emails to web pages about new products he'll be asked to promote to clients. His main clients are mid size firms. He makes site visits in his territory once a month (and so on...)
These stereotypes are built up usually by talking with a range of people in these positions, analyzing the data, and creating the composites. The challenge has been: how communicate these rich personas to the people who need to know about them - people like software engineers. The folks at CISCO found a surprising (and surprisingly effective) method: action figures.
Their approach was described in a session at CHI2007 called "Making Personas Memorable" (pdf).
Technorati Tags: chi 2007, chi2007, personas
The User Experience Design Group at CISCO trialed several approaches to presenting personas: stock photos of real people AS personas, realistic sketch versions of the photos, and finally, dolls. While initially the use of dolls was thought to be simply not credible, ultimately they became THE mode for communicating stakeholder needs in a way in which team members could empathize with, and be interested in.
The persona figures were photographed, and then photoshopped into "day in the life" stories to provide context for the personas. Stand up cardboard cards of the personas were distributed in the CHI2007 conference packs - these same cards now populate engineers' desks. Apparently at design meetings, these personas are referenced regularly to validate claims about an idea for a process "No, Millie wouldn't do that because..." and so on. (There's a figure called Vincent that they don't talk about too much: i think he looks like Christopher Walkin).
While the CISCO UXD team is interested in investigating more about how/why these figures are seemingly more effective than photos of characters, the appeal of the approach seems immediate. If the cost of the dolls manufacture weren't quite so prohibitive for the academic space (2000 originally; now CISCO pays 600 per), this seems like an incredible tool to help keep user needs in front of developer teams in an enjoyable and effective way. Use of second life avatars was discussed as a possible alternative route - but i wonder if the physical-ness of the dolls isn't an important factor for take up? The team speculated that the fact that these dolls were obviously professionally created - weren't just photoshopped up in a way that "anyone could do it" - also had a role in the takeup of the dolls.
No matter whether real or memorex or second life, these kinds of action figure personas (apparently they fit right in with the spider man action figures in some engineers' cubicles) seems well worth taking up.
Posted by mc at May 3, 2007 02:31 AM