User Modeling

Personas are built from user research and serve to keep designers, developers, product managers, and marketing managers focused on the needs, wants, goals, and concerns of the people who will be affected by the product.

Personas are based on user interviews, not focus groups or surveys. The question is not “what percent of the user population exhibits this behavior?” but “what goals and behaviors occur repeatedly in the user population?”

Core to the Little Springs Design process is user modeling, resulting in a set of personas used throughout the design process. Personas are user archetypes, each representing a collection of user goals and behaviors. When designing a product for a set of personas, the needs of the entire user population are met.

Focus groups and marketing personas are insufficient to understand user goals for interaction design. Knowing that a user is a “high flier” says nothing about how they manage their online social networks or think about photos. Without design-focused research, the best possible experience will be based on some expert’s vision of what user needs are.

Benefits

• A coherent voice of the user.
• A researched, agreed-upon view of end product stakeholders, eliminating such logic as “I am a user of the system and I want X, so we need to put in X”. Instead, the team asks “How would Janette use X?”, providing more relevant and accurate insight.
• An intuitive face and voice for what is classically presented as tables with complex and interlocking data developed quickly, in a few weeks. Further, the “whole picture” nature of the interview process generates a more accurate picture than the feature-by-feature research in some more formal studies.
• Significant user understanding by the design team. Because the design team does the interviews, they absorb significant detail that does not make it into the personas. The design team can, as part of the modeling process, develop hypotheses about specific use patterns and investigate their truth, something impossible with the traditional separation of the design and research teams.

Persona Creation Process

A team of two to three interviewer-designers work with the client project team to begin the process of understanding the problem space, its constraints, relevant competitors, and system stakeholders. The team then turns to interviewing potential system stakeholders, focusing on behaviors, environment, and goals.

The first few interviews with each type of stakeholder are general, eliciting a broad understanding of user context. Patterns of behavior and goals start emerging, typically with little connection to job title or demographic. Later interviews, expanding the original set, deepen the understanding of behaviors and user differences. Interesting odd comments and unforeseen insights are incorporated into subsequent questioning The interviewing process stops when interviews no longer reveal significant new information. The number of interviews varies by project, but can include 20-60 interviews.

The design team synthesizes the interview information into a set of user archetypes, each of which presents a distinct set of goals and behaviors. Personas are not market segments, but rather collections of behaviors and goals. The personas are given names, pictures, and a few biographical details to make them more alive.