The Persona Lifecycle: Creating User Personas from Data: User Experience 2008 Conference

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Amsterdam

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The Persona Lifecycle: Creating User Personas from Data

Chicago: Tuesday, November 4
Amsterdam: Tuesday, November 18

John Pruitt
Tamara Adlin

Full-Day Tutorial

Whether they're called user archetypes, profiles, or personas, abstract representations of users can be a powerful device to help you design better user experiences for your products and services.

Although the buzz around personas continues to increase, to use personas effectively, you need detailed how-to information to guide you through the creation process and tune your effort to your specific organization and situation.

In this tutorial, you’ll discover a highly practical “Persona Lifecycle” framework and get hands-on experience in creating personas from rich data. You’ll be immersed in the persona creation method through a series of interactive, hands-on exercises, an exploration of numerous examples and case studies, and several focused discussions.

We conclude by examining concrete examples and discuss how to keep your personas alive and helpful throughout the design and development process. You’ll also learn how to measure the effort’s ROI once your product or service has shipped.

Note: this session is all about creating personas. If you want more information about using personas, we recommend that you also join us for our related course, From User Data to Great Design, which includes practical methods for using personas during product design and development.

Armed with experience and a plan, you’ll be prepared to confidently lead your own persona effort, effectively creating and communicating personas in your organization and development process.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

Explain the power of personas to your organization
Identify your persona effort’s goals and prepare to measure their success
Create quick, ad-hoc personas with your team
Create detailed, data-driven personas with existing (and new) data sources
Develop a detailed plan for introducing your personas into your design and development process.

Course Outline

Introduction to personas

What are personas?
What problems are personas supposed to solve?
Why do personas work (and why do so many persona efforts fail)?
Overview of persona-related literature

The Persona Lifecycle method

Where the Persona Lifecycle came from and why it’s useful
Introduction to the Persona Lifecycle phases: A five-phase framework for integrating personas into the full development cycle

Phase 1: Family planning

Building a persona creation team: How many and what kind of people will you need?
“Organizational introspection”: How can you tell if your organization is ready for personas? What kinds of problems do you want personas to solve?
Data source analysis and collection: Where can you find data to use in your personas? What if you don’t have any money or time for data collection?
Assumption (or ad-hoc) personas: How can you use your company’s existing assumptions about users to help you with your persona effort?

Phase 2: Conception and gestation—How long does persona creation take? How many personas should you create? What are the steps in the persona creation process?

Step 1: Identifying user categories (Hands-on Exercise: Evaluating roles, goals, and segments)
Step 2: Creating ad-hoc personas and strategies for using them (Hands-on Exercise: Collecting and assimilating assumptions)
Step 3: Processing the data (Hands-on Exercises: Identify “factoids” in data sources; assimilate the factoids)
Step 4: Identifying subcategories of users and creating “skeletons” (Hands-on Exercises: Identify user subcategories; create skeletons)
Step 5: Prioritizing skeletons to identify personas (Hands-on Exercise: Prioritize skeletons)
Step 6: Developing skeletons into personas: Creating persona “foundation documents,” deciding what kinds of details to include in your personas, writing effective persona narrative

Phase 3: Birth and maturation

Prepare for birth and beyond: Create a persona campaign plan
Introduce the persona process and your personas to your colleagues
Progressively educate your colleagues and disclose details about your personas

Phase 4: Adulthood

Brief overview of how you can use personas throughout the product development cycle

Phase 5: Retirement and lifetime achievement

Measuring your persona effort’s return on investment: Measuring the effort’s cost and the process- and product-related improvements related to your personas
Deciding what to do with your personas now that your project is complete: Regaining ownership of the personas, evaluating your data, and reusing, reincarnating, or retiring your personas

Time permitting, we’ll discuss your plans for personas and offer specific ideas to help you “hit the ground running!”

Format

This full-day tutorial features lectures and interactive exercises.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides.

Who Should Attend?

This tutorial is intended for user-experience professionals (information developers, designers, usability specialists, technical writers, business analysts and product managers) who want to introduce personas into their organization or product team.

Participants need not be familiar with the persona concept and user profiling. For professionals with direct experience with personas (either good or bad), our approach offers an extension and enhancement of the basic concept, including a more rigorous, data-driven approach with clearer ties to other user-centered methods.

The only prerequisite for this course is a basic familiarity with common user-centered design concepts.

Instructors

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several Windows versions, including Windows 98SE, 2000, XP, and Vista, as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8); Tablet; and Ultra-Mobile PCs. Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. Pruitt holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than eight years, continually developing the method and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and other companies worldwide. Pruitt co-authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, with Tamara Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic at both academic and industry events.

Tamara Adlin is the founder and principal of adlin, inc., a customer experience consulting company located in Seattle, WA, and the co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with John Pruitt, Microsoft). Among adlin, inc.’s, clients are Apple Computer, Facebook, PetSmart, DietTelevision, Zillow, and Jobster, and Adlin serves on the advisory board for WetPaint and BazaarVoice. She has more than 13 years’ experience developing user-centered design and user interface design methods. Prior to starting her own company, she managed the customer experience team at Amazon Services, creating e-commerce solutions for online and multichannel retailers. She moved to Amazon Services from Amazon.com, where she was a Senior Customer Experience Specialist consulting with teams across the company to invent and improve user experiences for buyers, sellers, partners, and support professionals. Previously, she was the Human-Centered Design Lead at Attenex Corporation, a legal services software company in Seattle, where she designed advanced document management interfaces. Earlier in her career, Adlin led teams and designed interfaces for Web applications at Akamai Technolobies, INTERVU, and Netpodium Corporation. She started her user experience career as an Engineering Psychologist at the Army Research Laboratory, evaluating human factors issues associated with military systems. Adlin holds a B.A. From Vassar College and an M.S. in technical communication from the University of Washington, where she focused on user interface design techniques and interdisciplinary communications. Adlin has led workshops and been invited to speak all over the world on personas and other user-centered design methods.