Personas are hypothetical archetypes, or 'stand-ins' for actual users that drive the decision making for interface design projects. They are not real people, but they represent real people throughout the design process. It is important to realize that they are not concocted. They are discovered as a by-product of the investigative process and although imagineery, they are defined with significant rigor and precision.
To make them more realistic, names and personal details are made up and defined by the persona's needs and goals. A persona specification often contains a users emotional goals, usage goals and needs, barriers, pain points and opportunities. Though a persona specification is an important deliverable for disseminating information about users the greater value of personas lies in allowing designers to think as our users would. To quote Andrew Hilton, in his Boxes and Arrows Article, Personas and the Role of Design Documentation “Personas are actually the designer’s focused act of emphatic imagination, grounded in first-hand user knowledge.” Source: (1) Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Indianapolis: Sams, 1999, pp. 123-24. (Wording condensed and modified.)
WHO USES IT?
Information Architects Use them in design to focus their solutions on our user needs and goals. Tech Teams Use them to understand their users so that they can code solutions that help them achieve their goals. QA Teams Use them to write test scripts which reflect the ways that users realistically user their products.
HOW ARE THEY MADE?
here are 4 basic phases in a persona lifecycle:
1. Planning & Conception – Consists of understanding market segments and current user research in order to formulate assumptions to be tested during Contextual Inquiry Sessions.
2. Contextual Inquiry – Consists of a series of real world interviews of users in their actual environments to gain an insights into their behaviors, needs and goals.
3. Analysis – The analysis phase is used to cluster user feedback, discover behavior patterns and to triangulate qualitative, quantitative and existing market research in rder to draw conclusions and define the personas.
4. Assimilation – The assimilation phase is where the personas are introduced to the design and development teams, and are championed as real user with real needs.