Persona Sketching
D. Keith Robinson, web and UI designer, blogs about an excellent technique to use when designing a new product, website or service: realistic “user personas.”
A persona is an simple document that describes, in varying amounts of detail, a typical user or group of users. In essence “giving a face” or personality to those users. On a large, high volume site you could have many personas, each representing a subset of your user base. A good persona is always based on user research and data and will give you a manageable icon to work with when advocating for your user group(s).
All too often, websites seem designed with little to no insight about the potential users of the site - they seem to be more like vanity license plates than usable or user-centric. Keith hits it on the head with this one!
August 4, 2005 12:12 PM
Comments
I think this is less for the developers - who as you noted should already be familiar with these concepts - and more to translate use case scenarios into plain English, to help non-tech people understand what’s at stake in any given interface choice. Everyone’s come across a client who can’t understand that not everyone sees the world in the same way they do, so sometimes you have to explain it to them with visual language…
wrote AJ Kandy on August 7, 2005 11:13 AM
How does this differ from properly defining actors in Use Case Scenarios? (and there’s even a standardized process and language for that! UML!) ;)
wrote Boris Anthony on August 6, 2005 7:12 PM