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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 29 2007, 10:48 AM EDT (current) | laschmitt | 178 words deleted |
| Apr 29 2007, 10:48 AM EDT | laschmitt | 251 words added |
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It is easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective tools for innovation, design, and communication. A good persona description is not a list of tasks or duties; it's a narrative that illuminates their skills, attitudes, environment, goals, and needs and desires.
Personas are synthesized from in-depth engagements with a relatively small number of real people that represent the larger community, and captured in a structured definition that includes behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and needs and desires. They may include a few reality-based personal details to bring the persona to life. Personas are always created within a context that defines the ‘environment of interest’. For example, a context may be something like ‘perceptions of vehicle safety’ or ‘drug therapy compliance’. This defines the focus of the specific in-depth engagements and, hence, the discovered behaviors, goals, and needs and desires of the personas being developed. There is no ‘global’ set of personas (like Meyers-Briggs is for personality traits) that can be used for all research efforts. Like traditional market segmentation, the more focused the context, the more accurate the personas. Personas are specific to a particular innovation, design, or communication effort.
For each context, there is a small set of personas, usually from 4 to 10, that adequately represents the universe of people of interest. Ideally, you should seek the minimum number of personas required to illustrate key goals and behavior patterns. There's no magic number, but if you're designing a product and you have a dozen personas, then you may be making distinctions that are not very important.
A structured process is used to move from a community of individuals to a set of persona descriptions. Details of this process are in Uncovering Tacit Knowledge and Elicitation Tools, but the basic activities undertaken to implement the process are:
Insight into the dynamics of the community comes from generalization – seeing the forest from the trees. Community Members inform our understanding of those who think and choose similarly. Inovo’s term for these groups are ‘Personas’. A Persona represents a state-of-mind for a consumer and is characterized by the cause of the behavior as opposed to the behavior itself. Personal analysis is the causal analog of ‘Psychographic’ analysis as used in Market Research.
The structured description of a persona details the specific items that are important to the persona and the specific ways the persona makes decisions. It goes beyond the narrative description to provide item by item lists of the specific needs and desires that are the basis for adoption. Compared to the ‘traditional’ customer research approach, the structured persona description replaces the ubiquitous list of ‘value propositions’ with a much richer picture or the underlying causes of value.The different sections of a structured persona description are:Example IndividualsStories (metaphors and analogies)Beliefs & Behaviors - what they believe – true or not, and how they behaveNeeds & DesiresOutcomes – the rational. Increasing those that are valued, minimizing those that are notExperiences – the emotional. Enhancing those that are desired, mitigating those that are notDecision States - How the persona decides. What is important, what is satisfactoryThese ‘sections’ of the persona description are derived from the in-depth engagements held with community members that elicit specific needs and desires (expressed as outcomes and experiences).
Personas are synthesized from in-depth engagements with a relatively small number of real people that represent the larger community, and captured in a structured definition that includes behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and needs and desires. They may include a few reality-based personal details to bring the persona to life. Personas are always created within a context that defines the ‘environment of interest’. For example, a context may be something like ‘perceptions of vehicle safety’ or ‘drug therapy compliance’. This defines the focus of the specific in-depth engagements and, hence, the discovered behaviors, goals, and needs and desires of the personas being developed. There is no ‘global’ set of personas (like Meyers-Briggs is for personality traits) that can be used for all research efforts. Like traditional market segmentation, the more focused the context, the more accurate the personas. Personas are specific to a particular innovation, design, or communication effort.
For each context, there is a small set of personas, usually from 4 to 10, that adequately represents the universe of people of interest. Ideally, you should seek the minimum number of personas required to illustrate key goals and behavior patterns. There's no magic number, but if you're designing a product and you have a dozen personas, then you may be making distinctions that are not very important.
A structured process is used to move from a community of individuals to a set of persona descriptions. Details of this process are in Uncovering Tacit Knowledge and Elicitation Tools, but the basic activities undertaken to implement the process are:
- Elicit the knowledge and experience held by a knowledge community
- Capture the knowledge in way that enables analysis and synthesis
- Extract and organize the needs and desires of the community
- Synthesize this information and look for emergent patterns that identify personas
- Develop the persona definitions using dimensions of outcomes and experiences
- Create the Persona Adoption Models that capture the personas in software
Insight into the dynamics of the community comes from generalization – seeing the forest from the trees. Community Members inform our understanding of those who think and choose similarly. Inovo’s term for these groups are ‘Personas’. A Persona represents a state-of-mind for a consumer and is characterized by the cause of the behavior as opposed to the behavior itself. Personal analysis is the causal analog of ‘Psychographic’ analysis as used in Market Research.
The structured description of a persona details the specific items that are important to the persona and the specific ways the persona makes decisions. It goes beyond the narrative description to provide item by item lists of the specific needs and desires that are the basis for adoption. Compared to the ‘traditional’ customer research approach, the structured persona description replaces the ubiquitous list of ‘value propositions’ with a much richer picture or the underlying causes of value.The different sections of a structured persona description are:Example IndividualsStories (metaphors and analogies)Beliefs & Behaviors - what they believe – true or not, and how they behaveNeeds & DesiresOutcomes – the rational. Increasing those that are valued, minimizing those that are notExperiences – the emotional. Enhancing those that are desired, mitigating those that are notDecision States - How the persona decides. What is important, what is satisfactoryThese ‘sections’ of the persona description are derived from the in-depth engagements held with community members that elicit specific needs and desires (expressed as outcomes and experiences).
