Persona Builder - create educate
Design For The User
Personas are an effective method of basing your product on a User Centred Design.
What are personas?
Personas are a method that bring user research to life in an engaging way. Personas are fictional characters, but are based on real people that were observed and interviewed in the research process. Personas are an effective method of basing your product on a User Centred Design.
Why use personas?
Misconception of users
You cannot design a product for everyones needs. Most businesses target certain types of consumers in order to create a desirable and yet usable product. Using personas we can find out who we are designing the product for based on users' needs and goals.
Cut features and design debates
The average user does not exist and without personas designers, programmers, stake-holders or anyone else involved in the development of the product will not have the same coherent user in mind when developing the product. The term users is too flexible; personas aim to rectify any misunderstanding between who the users are by creating a fictitious character with a name and a background to allow teams to concentrate on the same user.
Usable products
In the persona process, user-research is performed by designers which enables them to see and meet the users in their natural environment. An advantage of using the persona process is that it stops designers designing for themselves. When the designer comes across a problem in the design and are not sure what is best for the user, they can return to the personas and ask what would the persona do in this situation?
Further Reading
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
The User Is Always Right A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steve Mulder
The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblatt
